Our internet went out Friday around 1 pm. This was in the middle of a terribly gusty day, so we figured that was the cause somehow – like a broken branch took out a wire or something – and simply waited. (Suffering! Oh, god, the suffering involved! My Sudoku streak was in danger!)
When nothing had changed 24 hours later we girded our loins and dived into Verizon’s customer service. Which was something of an ordeal, with multiple dropped calls (though they did always call us back) and waits of up to a half hour on hold) but after some ‘Have you tried unplugging the router?’ questions and some magical remote testing by them, they declared our router had simply died a natural death. It was, after all, over ten years old. So then a complete autopsy of our bill, with various discounts ended and others inserted and a speed upgrade and ghod knows what all, ending up with a final on-going total not significantly different from before. Which is nice. But there will be a one time $150 charge because a tech will have to come out to deliver the new router and plug it in personally.
And the next available appointment won’t be until Tuesday afternoon. Eeeeek! What will we do with ourselves cut off from the world for four whole days? (Heavy sigh) But what can you do? We prepared to live in the primitive past.
So yesterday I decided to play an old computer game (off line!) to pass some time, I ended the session around ten pm … and the game started up my browser and displayed one of those “Thank you for playing our game! Here are some more games you might enjoy! Why not give them a try?” type messages.
Say what??? At first I though maybe that was a message stored in the downloaded game, to be played in cases the poor user had lost Internet. But nope! When I looked that tiny icon for a connection was back in place!
My internet had risen from the dead!
Uh, hallelujah? It seems to be working normally, nothing amiss, what were you fussing over?
So, what do I do? The billing changes have been ‘finalized’ and I really don’t want to go through that again. And if the router was ‘expected’ to have died after ten years, maybe we should just accept the new one because it might go walk about again shortly?
But the main inspiration for this very long post is that when I finally got around to reading my email I found one from the Straight Dope yesterday! They NOTICED that I hadn’t logged in “lately” and wanted to tell me about the Hot New Threads that had bloomed while I was gone and didn’t I want to read them?
IOW, Come Back! We miss you!
I had no idea the SDMB did something like that. How sweet!
Oh, and the important thing: My sudoku streak lives on! I had done Friday’s word before the Internet died, and it rose again on Saturday early enough to get the next word under the wire. Whew!