What happens when . . .

What happens when the internet goes out. No I'm not talking about some hypothetical apocalyptic premonition. No, I mean what happens when the internet goes out here, at Ideas That Work.

So first, we curse Cox for the anomaly of our internet being spotty and going out when the wind blows, a heavy truck rolls by on the next street over, a squirrel uses the wire as a skywalk . . . you get the idea. Then we check our modem and router just to make sure our anger isn't misplaced.

Luckily, this time it was at the lunch hour so I asked Chris to slam the door on the way out just in case it jiggles something back into place. No such luck.

All through lunch I struggled with the internet/ no internet problem and finally called Cox. Just as the rep was finished setting me up with an appointment, which I was sure would be another failed attempt to locate the problem, the alert went out that the area was suffering from an outage. Well good, at least it would get the immediate attention of the Cox employees.

Next, Chris, Dan and I look for work that can be performed offline - a struggle when your business is online. I had been working with a style sheet issue and told Chris I would email it to him so he could troubleshoot... it only took a second for everyone to burst out in laughter - can't email without internet!

Then Dan manages to get the internet through his phone and becomes the sole productive worker in the office. He offered to let me connect since I wireless, but I turned him down in fairness to Chris - to which Dan replied,"Make me look like the only productive person!"

In the meantime the mailman came by - mail! Wow, we can communicate without the internet! But what happens when I need my friend Thesaurus.com? Hey, we found an actual print dictionary - and it lead us to an appropriate word for this situation: DisConnected - to be out of touch, not in the loop, separated, ostrasized.

About 2 hours later the issue is resolved and, as you can see from this blog post, we are back online - or not. Just as I was finishing this post... it's gone out again. Luckily, I had already saved this post to my notepad just in case.