Internet. We love it. We hate it. Either way we need it. Just this past week I took my first week off for vacation in seven years and looked forward to doing a lot of work on this website and podcast rss feed. Yes work on vacation.
I did take the first few days as relaxation however and that proved to be a bad idea. On Thursday morning a furniture delivery to a house just down the road proved to be too much for the cable line running from across the road to our house. The truck apparently was high enough that it ripped the line right off our house and our neighbours house taking our eaves-trough with it. That spelled the death of everything connected in our house.
It’s been a learning experience. I thought I would go through exactly what was down with you all.
First of all our voice-over-IP phone service is down. We are set up that in the occasion that the power goes out that we will still have a short time of phone service since it is connected to a UPS for battery backup. However a battery backup can’t magically fix a broken cable connection.
Second, All of our entertainment streaming devices are down. We can’t watch Netflix, listen to streaming music, none of that. The Roku is useless. We don’t have cable or satellite TV so that’s not an option.
Game consoles are straight game consoles again. There is no way to connect online to get updates or download digital games. We also can use voice chat.
My only saving grace here right now is that I have a mobile hotspot through my phone which is enabling me to write this and post here on the website. Sadly data is incredibly expensive here in Canada so doing any more than this is cost prohibitive.
This has all begged the question: Should I invest in a backup internet source? See having to rely on the cable company to come out is a real pain. Since we get our internet through a reseller at a cheaper rate we have to contact the reseller and they have to contact the cable company for us to set up an appointment to repair the cable going to our house. This in itself is not a problem but the cable company can take anywhere from two to five days to finally arrive to do the work. And then of course you have to wait around all day for them to arrive just so they can test the internet when it is repaired.
So since this all happened on a Thursday and no one works on the weekend around here we have to wait until Monday to get back online. MONDAY! That’s nearly five days of no possible communication in or out of our house.
It’s interesting that the Canadian Government has made the Internet an “Essential” service but we still have to wait nearly a week to get a repair for the internet. Crazy.
Anyways, as I slowly go mad over the lack of internet I turn a question to you. Have you ever had a long internet outage at your house or place of work? What did you do? Read a book? Get some boring paperwork done that you’ve been putting off? Let me know in the comments.
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