24 hours offline

The horror! The horror!

I’m still shaking a little bit, not enough to spill my coffee, but enough to hit the wrong letter on the keyboard occasionally, something I pride myself in being able to avoid due to the expert training I got in typing class at Leavenworth Senior High School way back in 1962.  “The internet,” the name we give it when things go wrong, went down yesterday around noon.  It didn’t happen all at once.  It was maddeningly intermittent at first, being on, then going out, then coming back on just enough for you to assume it was some kind of glitch in the system, which had happened before.

Then it was off permanently, no little antenna sign at all on the laptop screen or the phone.  Fiddling with it didn’t help.  We share access with our landlords next door, so I went over to restart the modem, which had sometimes worked previously when the interruptions were persistent.  I unplugged the thing and waited a full minute…it’s like holding your breath underwater, it feels so interminable…and then I plugged it back in and went back to our place to wait for it to come back on.

Which it did, for about two minutes.  Then it was off again.  So we got the landlord’s account information and went upstairs where I can get a weak signal on my phone and called Optimum, a sense of doom descending over us with each note of “light jazz,” or whatever their marketing people had determined would be the least offensive “on hold” music.  The minutes ticked by.  The music began to worm itself into our consciousness.  Occasionally there was a message that interrupted the music, asking if we wanted to leave a phone number, and they would call us back.  Not a chance.  To say that this was an emergency doesn’t do the situation justice.  It was a disaster. It’s also why I wasn’t able to file a newsletter last night.

I guess you don’t realize how completely your lives revolve around “the internet” until it goes out.  It’s not a convenience.  The word “essential” doesn’t capture it, either.  It’s a lifeblood.  We live way out on a peninsula called Springs that juts from East Hampton into Gardiner’s bay, and I mean way out there.  Turn right out of the driveway and in a couple hundred yards, you’re looking across the water at Gardiner’s Island itself.  For reasons known only to the cell phone companies, they haven’t put up a tower that yields decent service out here, at least not for AT&T, our provider.  The telephone service we have is through what’s known as “wifi calling,” which connects us to AT&T through “the internet,” so when it goes down, so does our phone service, except for the weak signal I can get up in the sleeping loft, for reasons known only to the cell tower and the gods. 

Finally a human being came on the line and took us through a complex procedure involving using an unwound paperclip to push a so-called “reset button” located in a little hole on the back of the modem.  So I went downstairs and across the breezeway and upstairs in the landlord’s place to where the modem is and hit the reset button and went back downstairs and upstairs to get back on the phone to continue talking to the Optimum human, only to be told that now the modem had reset, I had to go back over there and turn it off and on again.

You get the picture.  This went on for at least a half hour, trips up and down the stairs and resets and depowering and repowering, and of course “the internet” came back on for two minutes and went off again.  She, the Optimum human, said it would be a good idea to drive over to the Optimum store and swap the old modem for a new one and see if that solved the problem.

This morning, that’s what I did.  I drove to the Optimum store in a town about 20 miles away and swapped modems and drove back here and went upstairs in the landlord’s place and hooked up the new modem.  Naturally, there was a problem.  The Optimum store lady had given me a receipt with a little square bar-code like thing.  I was supposed to “hover” my cell phone camera over the bar code, and it would read it and take me directly to a website which would take me through the rest of the set up procedure for the new modem.

If my cell phone would work, which it didn’t.  The signal was too weak.  So the Optimum lady said if that happened, I should drive to where I got a better signal and do it in the car, and back at the house, the modem would reset itself if I followed the procedure on my phone. 

It didn’t work.  I called Optimum and waited until I got a human and she asked me if the modem had three blue lights on, or just two.  Well, I was two miles away in the car, so I had to drive back to the house and look. 

It had two lights.  I called Optimum, and the human said that meant the signal coming into the house wasn’t working so I would have to schedule a visit by a technician, who couldn’t come until tomorrow, Saturday, an “all day” appointment that meant he or she could arrive at any time during a 12 hour period.  I scheduled the appointment.

Then it occurred to me to go outside and check the junction where the cable came in from the street, because what the landlord called “an Optimum guy” had been there yesterday, and that’s when the trouble with the thing began.  I found the junction box and checked the connections.  The coax cables were screwed together, but just to be sure, I tightened and jiggled them.

Back inside, a miracle had happened!  Three blue lights suddenly appeared on the modem!  I called Optimum back, and after another interminable journey through “soft jazz” or whateverthefuck it was, I got a human, and she reset the modem, and all the blue lights came on, and “the internet” came back on.

What this little adventure showed me, along with the fact that both personally and professionally I cannot exist without “the internet,” is what it must be like out there in the hinterlands of Kentucky or Texas or Wyoming or wherever else they don’t have what is commonly referred to as “broadband.”  They don’t have, in other words, what I just didn’t have for 24 hours. 

For the broadbandless, and for the rest of us as well, the infrastructure bill can’t pass soon enough.  It’s an empty world out there where “the internet” doesn’t work, that’s for sure.  I certainly couldn’t survive living there.