My internet has been restored. You’ll never guess what was wrong, so I’ll just go ahead and tell you — it was in a car accident. Yep. That’s right. A car accident.
Unlike most of my friends who have switched to a localized internet company that uses fiber optics, I still have the internet I started with. The cable is adequate for my needs — just about the only thing that might suffer a bit from the slower internet speed is the hidden object game I play, but even that’s not an issue since I’m getting a bit bored with it. Anyway, that doesn’t have anything to do with my outage except to explain how a car could destroy my internet connection — this company still has the green cable utility box in the alley, and apparently, someone ran into it and destroyed it.
Since I am the only one who was affected, it leads me to believe that most people on this block who have internet have gone with the fiber optic choice, but I intend to continue dealing with the original company, as annoying as they are. My rate is locked in for as long as I live here, and since I don’t intend to move until I’m dragged out, I figure that static price will be a good revenge for any problems. Not that I have many problems — this is the first real outage I’ve experienced in the past four years.
When they told me it would be a week before they could restore service, I panicked because I spend (waste) a lot of time on the internet, and I had no idea what I would do with all that extra time. As it turns out, it wasn’t a problem at all. I mowed my lawn, did some gardening, gave my house a good cleaning, read books, watched movies on DVDs friends had passed on to me that I never watched (I hadn’t watched a movie in years), did one of the paint-by-number pictures I’d been given as a gift, walked some, exercised some. And then suddenly, here I am, with the internet again.
When I was without service, I discovered that one of the reasons I was online so much was that I’d get bored and restless when I read too much, and it was just habit to go on the internet to play games or look up gardening information or whatever. So now I have other options. Well, I always had those other options, I just didn’t make use of them. Chances are, I’ll go back to my old habits, but for now, it’s nice to be offline most of the time.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.
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