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vaguely-defined internet outage
Wednesday, July 20 2016
The internet was unreachable this morning and I soon discovered that there wasn't even a dialtone on the phone line that carries our DSL. So I decided to take advantage of the lack of connectivity by mowing the most-used part of the yard. The part I didn't mow (the north end) was very swampy at the time, and I was pushing a 120 volt electric lawn mower. When I was done with that chore, I found the dialtone was back and the internet was up, for the time being at least. Soon, though, it started acting flaky, refusing to stay up for more than a few minutes at a time. I can't use an internet like that; I depend on applications like Putty that need to maintain a constant connection to a distant server. My usual way of handling a shitty internet is to reboot the router (not by unplugging it, but by going to its configuration page and choosing reboot from the various options). Unfortunately, after I did this, I couldn't get an internet connection at all. I called Verizon to complain, and got the usual run-around, complete with vague, unspecified reference to an internet outage that "may" be affecting me. Unlike with a power outage, though, there was no sense given of its scale or anything but the fuzziest idea of when it would be fixed (the tech support person actually said "by Friday"). Nobody would put up with such vagueness from an electric utility. Central Hudson, for example, provides detailed tallies of who is being affected by power outages (with township granularity!) in real time. But Verizon is a de-facto monopoly and DSL is treated like a commercial service and not like a utility, so they get to be as vague as they want.
Then when I went to use my cellphone, I found its service had been mysteriously turned off. Had my last payment to CricketCellular not gone through? At around this time Gretchen was about to leave with Susan and David for a several-day vegan vacation in Philadelphia, and I didn't have any form of communication except old-school landline telephone (without DSL). Happily, tech support at Cricket managed to fix my phone with just a reset of a setting and a restart of the phone. So now at least I had a way to communicate with my colleagues in my remote workplace. Susan and David had said I could work from their place, so I packed up my stuff (including an extra monitor) and drove the 9.06 miles to their house. I arrived just as my team's daily meeting was beginning. After that, I went out for provisions, getting beer, humus, junky MSG-laden corn chips, a cup of coffee, and what I thought was an Annie's cheeseless pizza (I'd accidentally left that on a shelf while juggling all the other things loose in my arms).
It took me awhile to get things set up on my laptop sufficiently to do any actual code development. But I'd taken a 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse, and once that kicked in, I worked doggedly and productively, making it so a system that places things in categories can have two totally separate categorization systems existing at once.
Before I launched off on that productive tear, however, a young woman named Devin arrived to do something with the dogs. She was the dogsitter whom Susan and David had hired to look after Olive and Darla. Evidently, Susan and David had yet to communicate with her that I would be there. So that was a little awkward, but at least she didn't scream. I eventually fed the dogs and left at around 8:00pm. On the way home, I stopped at Hurley Ridge to get that pizza I hadn't bought earlier today. Vyvanse suppresses appetite, but all I'd eaten today had been MSG-laden corn chips with spicy Sabra-brand humus. I'd also begun drinking alcohol, which, when delivered in the form of Little Sumpin' Sumpin' Ales, is pretty caloric.
Back home, the dogs were happy to see me (even if I did smell like enemy dogs). The internet was sort of working to, and I managed to do a few things with it before giving up in frustration. It was on about 20% of the time and would be off for several minutes at a stretch. I made a series of increasingly-infuriated (and intoxicated) calls to Verizon tech support. The tech support people kept telling me about the vague "internet outage" that may or may not have been affecting my service, but then they'd try to walk me through restarting my DSL router as though that was going to do me any good. I actually swapped out my DSL router with another one, and the internet seemed to be working after that, at least for awhile. So I called Verizon telling them maybe my DSL router was bad and could they send me another one and that it seemed like the internet outage hadn't been my problem after all. At that point (perhaps to avoid sending me a replacement router), the story was that the internet outage was now over.
But then my internet turned intermittent again, so I called again, and now the story was that the problem must be somewhere in my house and they'd have to send someone out. But they couldn't do it until Friday morning. It's hard to have a livelihood based on a service that the provider of said service treats with such casual contempt.
I ended up drinking way too much booze and smoking a lot of pot. To keep the internet from driving me crazy, I relocated to the couch and watched teevee instead. I caught some of the Republican convention, though I'd just missed Ted Cruz failing to endorse Donald Trump (the so-called "Ted Wedding"). Instead I saw the walking meatball known as Newt Gingrich say a series of deeply ignorant things about foreign policy with the cocksure attitude of a professor of communication at a notorious party school. The Ted thing turned out to be the thing that blew up tonight at the Republican Convention. Last night, the dynamite that had gone boom was Melania Trump co-opting parts of Michelle Obama's convention speech from back in 2008. That little clusterfuck hit the trifecta: the source material was from a woman widely hated at the convention, the part stolen was about "honesty and integrity." And it all somehow made it into a primetime speech. Beautiful! But also sad!
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