Internet Outage

Today I had one of those incidents you just hate to deal with – an internet and phone outage that required a service call to the phone company. You know how it is, you can’t just get to the point and tell them what’s wrong, you have to listen to their whole voice message thing and answer all their questions like “Was your internet service working in the past?” Of course, this method saves time for the employee who eventually answers your call. You have no choice but to hang on, don’t say anything rash that might put you back at the start of the queue or even get disconnected, patiently answer all the inane questions.

But my favorite part was right after the question asking whether the problem was with my phone or my internet, and I had responded phone and internet. The next message informed me that while I was waiting, did I know I could check out their web site at www.xxx for troubleshooting suggestions? Yes, I wanted to answer, I know how to get to your freakin’ website – when I have INTERNET SERVICE! Calm down, Becky.

Finally, I got to talk to a human being in another country who tested my line, made me check my modem setup, and finally looked and discovered there was, indeed an outage in my area. I was instructed to try every four hours to see if service was restored, and that it could take up to 48 hours.

I work from home and I require internet service to do that. I took the day off.

(P.S. Since I am posting this, clearly my service has returned.)