This article is just satire and really doesn't have a call to action. I apologize if you were looking for some portfolio progression action, but sadly, weekends are a bit dry when it comes to content!
You read that title right. My wife and I had to go 24 hours without having proper internet access. Normally, that wouldn't be so bad. We could just go out on the town and find something else to occupy ourselves, right? WRONG. We are dealing with the corona virus here in Ohio and to make things worse we have been placed on self quarantine. So what does that mean for us? We have to stay home and cannot leave the house. A house that has no WiFi. How we managed to survive and entire 24 hour period, I'll never know.
Saturday started out pretty normal. We woke up and ate breakfast as most normal families do. I got my coffee prepared and sat down at my laptop to begin playing some RuneScape to start my day. During the middle of catching some virtual fish, the game froze and proceeded to crash. OH NO. I knew what was coming. This only happens when our internet cuts out. Now usually this only lasts for about 5 minutes and everything is back up in running like nothing happened. But on this day, something was different. Something was far different!
I went to our modem and router and unplugged them and tried to reset them. You know, like most IT professionals do. But alas, that quick fix did not seem to work. I had to think of some other tricks! I put on my shoes, some heavy clothing, and my medical face mask (yes we were able to get our hands on two face masks!) and I headed outside to check all the wires and cords that normally spew from our house. I think I was hoping (an not hoping) to find that a cord had been damaged or cut during weather events. But this too was a wasted effort and nothing looked out of the ordinary.
I began to panic and think to myself "Is this going to last forever?" and began to make myself crazy. My wife on the other hand was able to handle the situation a lot better and proceeded to work on her jigsaw puzzle and play video games on the 3DS. (Poor girl, she couldn't see the magnitude of the situation we were in!) I caved and turned the mobile data on on my smartphone and tried to read some web-pages from my internet provider to see if anyone was having outages. Surely if others were having issues then they would be working to fix it and keeping us updated. But sadly nothing confirmed this for me and I had lost hope once again.
I started a "virtual chat" with a chat bot from the internet provided. It took 3 hours for them to send a reply to me. At which point I was able to talk with them through all the problems I had experienced and what trouble shooting I had done. Of course, since they're IT professionals, they told me to unplug and plug the modem back in (WOW Who would have thought?!) but of course that didn't work. Stumped, the chat bot assisted me in setting up an appointment for a technician to come out and assess the damage. Cool, right? WRONG. We're under quarantine and we can't risk having someone come out here to fix this problem. I agreed and allowed them to schedule an appointment even though it would be 12 hours from the time of contacting them. In my head I was hoping the issue would correct itself before the appointment and I would be able to call of the hounds, or I was hoping we would get our Covid19 results back as negative and we could take ourselves out of quarantine, thus allowing the technician access to our abode.
Somehow, through mixture of alcohol and mobile gaming, my wife and I survived to Saturday night and went to sleep, hoping the problem would be fixed in the morning. And guess what? By 10am on Sunday the problem had been fixed! Now I just needed to call off the technician. As soon as I went to cancel the service call I got an automated called from the internet provider saying "the large outage affecting your area has been fixed. Please cancel any appointments related to this issue as needed.". VERY SUSPECT sounding because if I recall there was no outage in our area? What could this mean? Was this a social test to see how people fair during a quarantine and finding out how vital internet is for them?
Just kidding, I am not a conspiracy person nor am I a tin-foil hat person. I know this was all just bad timing and I tried to make this as dramatic sounding as possible to make a decent blog read. Take it as you will, because I am here now as a survivor! As always, let me know what you think or if you've been in similar situationss!
Don't fret, the regular scheduled content will still be made come next week, this was totally just to fill my void this weekend during this awful quarantine.
Thanks for reading!