I’m back online after a week with no internet and several weeks before that where the internet kept dropping out entirely.
The downside of living in an oldish house is this is absolutely the sort of place where a plumbing problem can take out the internet. I’m relieved at least that it wasn’t my first outlandish theory that the opossums which constantly pull at the grates for our crawlspaces, had worn through one of the cables. The plumbing problem will at least be fixed and hopefully non continuous. The opossums on the other hand are present every night.
The Frontier service person did quite well in identifying and fixing the problem. It almost, but not quite, fully relieves my annoyance at Frontier in the fact that their not wanting to send a technician and wanting to try and fix everything remotely according to their scripts dramatically extended the amount of time we were without service.
And here’s the thing, one might think no big deal on a lapse of internet service, but so many things are connected now. No streaming services is an obvious problem, worsened that we had actually just made time to watch some of those things we’d been meaning to get to. But we still had the television. However the On Demand function uses the internet, as well as the cable guide. Had the problem persisted one more day we wouldn’t have had the guide, and our DVR would have been rendered useless.
Worse than the television issues, I write on a Mac. I fully believe that Apple is so convinced that the internet is as reliable everywhere as it is in Cupertino that they never really bother to test what happens if there’s an outage. For the first three days the computer worked fine. In fact I maybe wrote a bit more since I wasn’t dicking about online. But on the fourth day the computer entered some befuckled state. I’m guessing one or more of the programs in the start up weren’t happy that they couldn’t update or connect to a server somewhere and this threw things into some sort of loop where nothing worked, including neither Scrivener nor Word. So that sucked. Fortunately with the return of the internet the computer seems to have unfucked itself and I can open Scrivener again.
So I’ve lost the better part of a week, but I’m relieved to be able to get going again.
