Christmastimes, Part III: The Dark Ages

 

Hello all. I am currently writing this shortly before 4am on December 23. I am also writing it in a text document to post later, because, well, my internet has been hard down for about 26 hours and counting now, and there is no estimated time to repair.

Well, I should say...it’s not been hard down that entire time—it did come up twice, once for about five minutes yesterday morning and a second time for about twenty minutes yesterday afternoon. Other than that, it’s been dead in the water. There is an outage affecting our neighborhood, per my ISP (so, it’s not just me). I don’t know anything other than that.

The temperature outside is -9. Yesterday morning it got down to -13. The wind chill outside is consistently between -30 and -40. There’s an inch or so of snow and packed ice on the driveway and sidewalks that, because of the cold, can’t really be de-iced, shoveled, or snow-blown to clear it until the temperature gets well above zero, which at this point doesn’t look like is going to happen until...after Christmas.

Yes, we have power and heat, and no our pipes haven’t frozen (yet—because I know my luck if I don’t include the “yet”). Yes, I would much rather have power and heat than internet.

I am still...very frustrated. I am not really hungry. I can’t really sleep more than a few hours at a time. I am filled with constant anger and rage and stress during a time where that’s not supposed to be part of my life. I took this time off work specifically to get some downtime and to decompress, to de-stress, to get some rest. 95% of the things I do to get downtime and decompress/de-stress involve the internet in one fashion or another. It’s 2022, there’s no longer a way around that. I can’t shake the anger and frustration. I’ve tried.

Daisy, forever the optimist, said “Play a video game. Read. Take a nap.”

I’ve done all of those things. They don’t help. I am so sick of video games. If I try to read anything more than about 30 pages or so, it puts me to sleep—and then I wake up and the cycle begins all over again because there is still no internet.

I guess I can take solace in the fact that even if I’d not taken PTO and had actually wanted to work during this time, I wouldn’t be able to anyway, and that would’ve felt like a reprieve.

My executive director actually reached out to me last night and asked me if I could help out. I screenshotted him the 16 hours’ (at that juncture) worth of attempts to get any sort of estimated restoral time out of my ISP and called in two of my employees for overtime at his request (I do have a working 5G phone, just nothing else—and I hate using my phone for things I’d use my computer for otherwise). Yesterday would have been the best day possible for Daisy to work from home, with the cold/windchills and snow—she couldn’t do so because of no fucking internet, and was forced to go out and risk her life to get to and from work.

When I call my ISP about the outage—knowing full well that the customer service reps can’t make it resolve faster (it’s literally what my team does at work for a different telecommunications provider), but to get any information on what’s down and why—my ISP won’t even let me get to a representative. The automated voice tells me there’s an outage in my neighborhood (no shit?) that’s being worked on and says “speaking with a customer service representative will not help to restore service faster. Thank you for your call, goodbye.”

….That’s great, but I want a billing credit—and I also want to know what’s actually down, what’s actually broken, and why it’s taking so long to fix. And if the answer to the last question is “because our technicians are union and they don’t want to work/fix things when it’s cold, so we can’t force them” my answer would be “Great, then you can cancel my service with you, and I’ll go get a T-Mobile wireless internet hub and will have service today, in 15 minutes from opening the box.”

Which they probably know their customers would say, and is also very likely the actual reason it’s been down this long.

I’m not particularly anti-union, but I am also of the mindset that having home internet down for well over 24 hours for an entire neighborhood during the holidays is completely inexcusable. Not being able to talk to a living person to get a billing credit or information is inexcusable. Not having a known time to repair for over 24 hours is inexcusable. This is not business-level internet where outages have large enterprise-wide causes and solutions (for one, those outages actually tell the customers what’s going on and usually have a known estimated time to repair—I know this because keeping customers informed about those things is quite literally my job) – this is residential, which is handled by different teams and is usually fixed much more quickly. Not knowing the wheres and the whys, and just being left in the proverbial dark ages about all of it is inexcusable.

Yes, I realize the irony here. It’s still patently ridiculous.

In my downtime, and I do refer to it loosely as that, I was able to wrap all of the Christmas presents, do all of the household laundry, strip and wash the bedding, disassemble the cats’ water fountain to clean it and replace the pump, and run two loads of dishes through the dishwasher.

I also shaved my crotch, took a shower, and had three good shits, but I’m sure you didn’t need to know all of that.

When Daisy got home I tried to be sweet and loving as much as possible, but I was still a white-hot ball of anger. I made sure to make it clear to her that I was not angry with her but the situation, and that I didn’t want to take it out on her. She tried to help, tried to mitigate the issue with some creative solutions (including finding a way to stream Netflix from her phone to the TV) and I appreciated that, but she couldn’t and can’t solve the overall problem of no internet. She does not have an Internet Wand.

“You get so fixated on things and just become miserable because of them,” she told me. “I don’t stress about things outside of my control that I can’t fix.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” I said. “It is that lack of control that makes me stressed out about these things. If they were in my control, I would have no reason to be stressed about them.”

I then explained to her that this is supposed to be my relaxation time, the time where I’m not supposed to be angry or stressed since it’s the holidays and since I’m off work, and basically how it always seems that one thing or another happens to completely ruin that for me—as if I’m never allowed to really enjoy anything in life if I’m not somehow also suffering in some small (or large) way. As it stands I’ve lost a full day (and am going into a second) of my vacation time feeling like I’m trapped in a jail cell, completely disconnected from the outside world and waiting to die.

Metaphorically, of course.

It honestly just feels like this entire holiday season has been hollow and superficial. I’ve tried to make the best of it and have tried to reminisce on the good feeling of holidays past, that sense of “Christmas magic” I suppose—but while there’s a little of it still there, it feels like most of it is completely gone. I haven’t spent a Christmas with my parents in a full decade, and the last time I did, I got stranded in West Virginia two extra days because of a snowstorm. I buy and send gifts to people and I receive some in return, but it all feels like I’m going through the motions without feeling moved by any of it. The crushing cold weather has made it worse and has added on a new layer of stress, because if the internet can stop working for a few days, so can the power, so can our water.