Wednesday, August 3, 2011

No Internet!

The Internet went off at about 10:00 yesterday morning and was not restored until about noon today. 26 hours of solitary confinement! I called my provider a couple of times and was told the same thing. "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Try accessing the Internet again in a couple of hours". The second time I convinced him that I was a retired Telus employee and asked him what was "really" going on. He said he was told that some scheduled maintenance went bad and that most of the Province was dead. He had no idea how much longer it would be down and had been told to say two hours. I worked in the radio and fibre optics field and we always had redundancy protection. If something broke, there was always another system standing by to take the traffic. Lengthy outages were very rare back then. Times change I guess.

8 comments:

  1. Yikes, that would drive me nuts. I can't be without internet, just like you can't be without TV. They should give you a discount on your next month of service!

    www.travelwithkevinandruth.com

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  2. When I worked in internet and TV with your former employer, I was surpised that there was no backup built in. The idea is that the equipment is virtually bulletproof these days. That usually means to me that it will last longer until it breaks, but when it does, look out! At least you didn't lose your TV as well.

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  3. Customer Service is no longer. I too worked for NB Tel and a service outage was a serious thing, I remember getting out of bed at 3AM and driving 75 miles to repair a wet cable to restore service to a dozen customers but that happens no longer now they give a 48 hour repair time.

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  4. We experienced the same outage. The first six hours were the worst, finally we decided to just ignore the darn thing until the next morning. Much more relaxing that way but oh how we do rely on the internet. I didn't realize how often I used the computer to research something that i needed to know, like right now!

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  5. The "immediacy" of the internet can make it frustrating when it craps out. We've had times in the afternoon when it's gone dead, which is usually a cue for me to do something else. I finally bolstered my patience and courage and submitted an inquiry to our carrier,(all in German of course) and their reply more or less was, "We're doing upgrades, not sure when we'll be done. If you'd like, bring in your wireless modem for a hard wired type. (??) WE'LL CALL YOU (ha!) when we're done, and you can come in and make the switch back". I actually laughed out loud when I read that.
    Good Lord! Bring in my modem? You'll call me? Right. And....why on earth would I pay for something I'm not getting by getting rid of my wireless? Idiots.
    I guess they're finished, since it got better. The alternative is that we have an abundance of hotspots in Vienna, put that's a pain. I have to go to a cafe?
    Groan.
    It's usually best to just "relax", and step away from the computer. It'll come back if it's gonna.

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  6. So Telus, is giving us each $10.00 as compensation for the outage! I'll take it.

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  7. Great! $10. I shall buy myself a bottle of fine wine with it!

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  8. Good news comes with your compensation. All too often one is left in the lurch. Two jugs of Padre Kino coming up??

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