Country Chatter

For one whole week, yes that is seven whole days, we had no internet service. Our trusty pal, Verizon, moved with malware infected speed to fix the problem.

It started last Monday about the middle of the morning when we discovered we could not connect with cyber world.  With a business this is tough!!!  Suddenly we could not process credit card sales, download invoices from vendors, retrieve documents from Dropbox or send orders by email.

I became first-name friends with tech support guru’s with hard to understand accents. I tried not to get frustrated with their endless questions and trouble shooting maneuvers I had trouble understanding. After all, they were just trying to help me. The earliest a technician could arrive on site was on Thursday, in four days.  Their response to my pleas that I am a business and need help was, “I am so sorry, but that is as soon as anyone is available”.  And no, they assured me, there was no problem in our area even though numerous of our customers were having the same issues at the same time and Verizon’s own  online recording for you to listen to while on hold waiting for help was “if you live in the areas of Chesapeake, Maryland and 18th street in New York you may be experiencing wide-spread outage and they are working on it.” Incidentally, this same recording is still playing one week later! Finally, they decided to send me a modem instead of a technician.

The new modem was to be delivered before 4 p.m. on Thursday. At 4 p.m. sharp on Thursday I was on the phone with Verizon informing them that the modem had not arrived. And, would you believe, they had no record that a modem had been issued or shipped to me. But, they would be happy to ship one immediately!!! The next day the “no record” modem arrived and the day after a second one! I hooked up the new modem and the ominous red DSL light still blinked and the internet light stayed dark.

Again, I call Verizon. Now the earliest they could send a technician was in another four days;  Monday, January 2, between 8-9 a.m. I guess all the techs must be in Chesapeake and Maryland! About 11 this morning a technician finally arrived and several hours later I was connected back to cyber world. The problem was not at our location-which I had figured out, but on the main line. Somehow the line had lost all its “programing” and had to be reformatted.

When going through something like this you realize how totally dependent we and the world has become on the internet. (This is a scary fact). I could use my cell phone to check the news, email and fb but I could not get the invoices I needed as my cell phone didn’t support the programs I needed nor could I print. I had to go borrow a “connected” computer. I stepped back in time and sent orders by fax and rerouted my credit card machine to use the “slow” phone line.  For better or for worse we survived. But let me tell you, a week is a long time to be down and I did not like it.