Internet Is Down, Life Screeches To A Standstill

Popping in for a quick hello. This week had not gone as hoped as far as blogging goes due to a little issue called "our home internet is down and a tech can't come til Friday." Sigh...so frustrating. Amongst a ton of other things I had to do yesterday I spent the entire day trying to get our internet connection working again...as you'll remember I'm the tech guru at our house...which isn't saying much! The outages map below doesn't engender a lot of confidence in my internet provider.

But after three hours with three different internet provider customer support agents - (Can you hear the giant SIGH?) my phone hotspot or their system connection would fail just as they were finalizing the appointment for a technician to come out. I can't tell you how crazy frustrating that was!

We ran through all the requisite tests..."move the modem to another phone jack, unplug it for 10 seconds then plug it back in, hit the reboot button, stand on your head, facing north, hold the modem between your teeth while drinking a glass of water and singing the national anthem! Now tell me what the lights on the front on your modem look like?" Every time the DSL light turned solid, ugly red.

Finally at 5 p.m., as I was rushing the third agent to wrap things up before we lost our connection yet again, we nailed it all down, but of course we're out of internet service all week until they fix it. Then there is the whole clause in the deal that if it's a problem on our end we have to pay for it but if it's their service there is no charge. I think it's their service or their modem. We shall see. And we'll be asking for a refund off our bill for the days we're not actually getting service. I keep trying to reboot out modem thinking they'll find a problem on their end and get it fixed and magically we'll be back in business but that hasn't happened yet.

Of course this was the week I had planned to do a ton of business online, needed to edit lots of photos...just needed to be on my computer a lot and needing the internet. So that's been a disaster. It's amazing how much you can't do without the internet. Having it on the phone is fantastic but it's not the same and now every minute we're on the internet in our house via our phones, either using the internet on our phones or hotspotting, we're eating up data minutes. Ergh. Mucho frustrating.

It's seems like in this day and age you should not have to go without the internet for a week, there should be a faster fix than that. Meanwhile I feel like we're all being held hostage a bit, unable to do so much. Kiddo is working on a major month-long school project and needs the internet too. We're all a little frustrated. It also means no netflix, etc. etc. because we don't want to blow out our phone minutes.

I have a few posts in progress and will share some fun we had today with you tomorrow. We had a magical evening which included being able to use the internet via The Man's phone for entertainment and learning via candlelight out in the front yard.