To my complete shock and horror, I went to get on-line midday yesterday only to see the dreaded Yellow Triangle of Doom on my Internet connectivity: no Internet connection. No Ethernet connection. Nothing. Nada. Niente!
As a grown woman and rational human being, I stayed calm. For about ten seconds.
"SCHATZ!" I yelled to my husband. "Fix my Internet! Please!!"
He fiddled for a while. Zip. No Internet.
I reset the router, the modem, shut down and fired up the computer a few times. Bupkus.
That's when I got truly desperate and fished out my last cable Internet bill to look for a number to call. "Customer Care" and a number was listed in tiny little print down in one corner. I hate it when they call themselves "Customer Care." It usually implies the opposite.
"Hello, and good afternoon," a cheery female voice answered after the fourth ring.
"Hi!!" I said, "I have a--"
"I have the telephone number listed for this account as xxx-xxx-xxxx," the automated voice pressed on, "is that right?"
"Yes, but I want to talk to a--"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand you. Is the number listed for this account correct?"
Oh, God. Resistance is futile. "Yes."
Automated Cheery Chick took me through a simple troubleshooting sequence that I had already tried, but she said I had to hang up and try it and call back. I suspected I was just going to be told to do the same thing over and over again, but when I called back, Automated Cheery Chick surprised me. "I see here that you called recently about a service problem. Are you calling about the same problem now?"
"YES."
"Okay, let me transfer you to our technical support."
And that was it--I actually got a human being on the line named Erica. She tried to send signals to my modem to tell it to get off its lazy non-operating butt and hook me up with my beloved Internet. The modem was having none of it. I even hooked everything up to a second modem and she tried again.
"Still offline," Erica sighed. "I can send someone out tomorrow. Would that be all right?"
Yowza! That sounded great to my withdrawal-stricken little brain.
"He'll be there between 2:00 and 4:00," she said, "and he'll call to let you know he's on his way." Excellent! This actually sounded like customer service.
I suffered last night like a junkie coming off heroin. No Facebook updates! No e-mail! No reading Lindsey's blog to find out how much money she made from her fundraiser! No weather updates! Nothing! AAAAAAGGGH! I had to call my dad at 7:00 this morning to get a weather report so I'd know how to dress for my run.
And this afternoon, things went exactly as Erica had promised: Bill called at 1:56 PM to say he was coming, pulled into my driveway at 10 after 2, and had the problem fixed by a quarter to three. (Apparently my neighborhood is changing frequencies or something, and my modem and router both had to be reset to the new frequency. Bill fiddled around at the telephone pole and on the side of my house for quite a while.)
So now my dearest Internet and I are together again! I missed it so. It KILLED me that I couldn't post to this blog yesterday. I hope that I won't have any more service outages.
Anyway, now that we are up and running again, I am going to play catch-up with my posts: I will write what I wanted to post yesterday and post it with yesterday's date, and then I will write today's post, and then I'll be all caught up. Whew!
INTERNETS I LOVE YOU. DON'T EVER LEAVE ME AGAIN!! *hugs Interwebs tight*
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