perkonis

Yesterday I had the strangest thing happen. I was happily reading Slashdot while trying to look busy at work. No, that’s not the strange part. I do that all the time. I had just read a comment that pointed out that the backhoe was the natural enemy of an ISP. Just as I read this, I heard yelling from the office next to me that his email wasn’t working. That’s still not the strange part, that’s pretty much how someone initiates a “trouble ticket.”

My first guess was that he broke something (again), but I quickly figured out that we had no internet connection at all. It was pretty obvious when Slashdot wouldn’t load. Then I had to explain that no internet connection, no email. Seems self explanatory to me, but I am smarter than your average noob. So then I got yelled at for the net being broken. You see, whenever teh interwebs stop working, it’s my fault. It’s truly awe inspiring the amount of power I apparently have. I am the supreme overlord of the tubes so when they get clogged, the obvious solution is to yell at me. Or better yet, yell at me to call someone else and yell at them. What problem can’t be fixed with enough yelling?

When I went to call the cable company, our phones were borked. We couldn’t make calls outside our local exchange as they would just result in a fast busy signal. Great, now I broke the net and the phones. All while I was doing nothing. Imagine the mayhem I could cause if I were to actually do some work.

Since the phones weren’t working, I grabbed my cell. No service. WTF? Did we just get nuked or something? How on earth did we just lose all communication in Podunk, Indiana? I managed to get enough of a signal on my phone by standing in the middle of the parking lot to call the phone company to report the outage. Then I spent the next hour or so explaining how I did not break the internet.

The problem got fixed in a few hours and we were back up and running. Oddly enough, I didn’t get credit for fixing the internet. The phone company was nice enough to call me back to verify the problem was fixed so they could close out their ticket. I asked who had broken what. His reply? Someone had cut a cable with a backhoe.

OK, maybe it was my karma that caused it.

Observations, Stuff That Annoys Me

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