Friday, October 24, 2008

Cut Off in Surburbia

Whew, I'm back. Bright and early this morning I had my first clue that something was amiss when my cell phone rang at 6:15 a.m. It was our health worker reporting in sick and telling us our phones were not working.

The downside of digital phone with your cable company. A quick check and, yes, I was out of internet access and any television reception. Everything dead. As a doornail.

Normally I would wait until the cable came back, but for some reason I felt compelled to call and see what was going on. No, no one else was reporting problems, so a maintenance technician was dispatched. Three hours later he arrived, checked everything and told me my cable was out. Well, duh. A few minutes later and he cheerfully informed me that it was nothing he could handle because it was out at the main line. Oh, and by the way, most of the line technicians are still in Beaumont putting the Gulf coast back together in the aftermath of Ike. I could be assured that my cable would be back sometime today or tomorrow depending on how far away their skeleton crew was today.

After another hour or so of dead calm quiet, I put a load of CDs in the stereo to break the silence. It's just downright eerie without some noise.

A side effect of this whole thing is that I got a day off from work. Normally when our healthworker is out sick I just plug into the office network via the Internet and keep going as if nothing happened. But no internet, no work. Not very often that I am completely disabled.

So, when life gives you cable interruption, make the most of it. I have backed up my computer files, done some laundry, made a pot of soup, worked on my on-going project to clean up the genealogy notebooks, sicced dogs on squirrels, watched some of the backlog of recordings on the DVR and puttered.

I could get used to this. Maybe a random disconnect from the world isn't such a bad thing.

LSW

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