There
is a problem with living in the cloud and relying on the internet. The
internet has to be functional. A few nights I experienced this reality
in full measure.
I
was having trouble retrieving email earlier. I was on my iPad. The
first thing I did was turn it off and turn it back on. It still was not
working. The indicator showed I was connected to the internet but I
was now getting messages saying the server was not responsive. I
proceeded to do the next best thing, I went and rebooted my modem and
wireless router by unplugging them and plugging them in again. That did
not work either. So I did it again and again to no avail. i then knew
something bigger was up.
I
decided not to futz with it any longer. It reminded me of last year or
two years when there was a similar issue. It turned out that time that
Comcast, my service provider, had a massive system wide internet
failure and did not let anyone know. When I found out, I was more than a
little perturbed. So, this time I decided to call them and see if this
was a repeat of that event.
I
picked up the house phone and got nothing. It was dead. Since, the
phone which is voice over internet, I assumed in all the plugging and
unplugging of wires, i had compromised the phone by not quite plugging
everything back the way it was. I made sure everything was secure and
tried the phone again. This time I got a busy signal. Odd. I tried
again and got a dial tone. I dialed the Comcast toll free number and
went through the menu and waited... and waited. It took ten minutes to
get an agent. I could hear the young man without any issues but he kept
saying that he could not hear me and that I was breaking up. We lost
the connection probably due to my pushing random buttons on the phone
handset in the belief that I had some chance of improving the connection
quality by doing so..
Judy's
cell phone then rang. It was the agent, thankfully. Once I
established that he could hear me, I asked him if there was a system
wide outage. He said not that he was aware of. He told me he was
running diagnostic tests on my modem and saw no issues. He instructed
me to reboot the modem again this time taking out the backup battery to
get a real reboot. I had not done that. I was in the process of trying
to get the battery out when he stopped me. He said he was just
notified that enough people were calling in that made it a wider problem
than just my house. He said that a node/router/whatever of theirs had
failed and crews were being dispatched and that he had to say it might
take 24-48 hours to fix. Oh my.
I
had work to do that required access to the internet. I had a new
client and some pressing deadlines i.e. the next morning. The files I
had to work on were waiting for me in my email account. This, of
course, required the internet and I could not access them. So, I was
dead in the water in this regard. I could have done other business
development and personal work but these files were also in the cloud in
either google docs or Evernote. These applications are wonderful
because they are accessible from any computer, pad, or phone.. Any
computer, pad, or phone connected to the internet that is.
I
could have used my phone. That is not dependent on my home network.
The phone is good enough for texting, taking photos, checking quick
facts and information on the internet, checking email, and perhaps
responding to the emails if the response does not have to be too
detailed. Oh yeah... you can actually make calls on these phones as
well. I could have probably worked on the file but given the screen
virtual keyboard size, I would have been more frustrated than
productive. And I was already pretty frustrated.
Wait a minute. My iPad was 3g. It had cellular capability. I would
just use that and be back in business. Silly me. Why hadn't I thought
of that earlier. Sometimes, I really act twice my age. So, I switched
on the cellular and it was slow. Not just slow, but s-l-o-w... It was
molasses in the dead of winter slow. Clearly, everyone in my
neighborhood and town was already doing what I had just thought of. The
cellular bandwidth was fully utilized. So, this option did not really
work. The files I needed simply were taking forever (and that is a long
time) to download. So, my brilliant, albeit late in coming idea, was
not so brilliant after all.
I was cut off from the world. I was in desolation. I was exiled.
Well
not really. Thankfully, we still had electricity. I could read a book
if I wanted to. Luckily, I still had hardcopy books in my home. Whew.
Even better, the cable TV still functioning. The Comcast agent had
said that the television network was separate from the internet.
Whew... what a relief. I could watch The Green Lantern or The Blind Side
for the umpteenth time. I could still check on the weather every eight
minutes on The Weather Channel. I would have to suffer without the
hour by hour forecast that the internet version provides. It was
horrible but somehow I survived.
I
decided instead to work on a new file. I could use my laptop and
Microsoft Word. Oh my, how retro. I could use my iPad and their word
processor, Pages. The iPad option was less retro but essentially the
same same. So, that is what I did. It was not what I was planning to
do. It was not what I needed to be doing. But, I was doing...
something.
The
internet was not down as long as the Comcast representative had said
it might. It was down about three hours. I was engrossed in my make
work writing that I never even realized it had come back on-line. It
felt like 1989.
Through
perseverance, determination, and resolve, I somehow and miraculously
survived this ordeal. The human capacity to endure never ceases to
amaze me.
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