July 13, 2022
This past Friday was certainly
an interesting day here in my neck of the woods. One of Canada’s three major telecommunications
companies, Roger’s Communications, had what we’ll call an “oopsie”. And what an
oopsie it was.
I awoke, as I often to do, to
dog barking. I knew David was already up, so I was able, before my eyes had
even fully opened, to guess that he might be outside on the porch with whichever
dogs would have gone with him—and those that were left inside were barking.
It's sad, but true, that the
first thing I do when I get out of bed—after the bathroom, of course, is to make
a cup of coffee. But this particular morning, I didn’t go directly to my Keurig.
I decided instead to head to the porch and frown at my husband.
You see, when I get up ahead
of him, which is most of the time, I make a solid effort to keep the dogs
quiet, or at least try to, so that he can sleep until he’s done. I was feeling
pouty last Friday morning because I knew, when I was awakened that I hadn’t
been done sleeping yet. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if the
day doesn’t start off good, there’s not much hope of it getting better until
bedtime.
I opened the front door and
looked at him in full pout. He appeared
not to notice my pout. He said, “Good morning. Your daughter left you a note on
your keyboard.”
Well, that was different. I
grumbled my way to my office, and found her note, which read: “Good morning.
Roger’s is down Nation wide. So you are left back in the dark ages. Love you.” (I
later discovered that she had left the note on the coffee maker, because we
both go there first thing.)
She wasn’t kidding. There was
no cable television. No cell phones. No internet. And therefore no available
information on what had happened and when we might expect it to be fixed.
That was what bothered me the
most—the lack of information. Asking the proverbial question, “What’s
Happening?” and getting no response. I asked David to bring the “clock radio”
out of the bedroom. Now, to be clear, we haven’t used it as an alarm clock—and therefore
as a radio—since hubby retired. I shouldn’t have been surprised that, having
not behaved as a radio since the end of 2017 it had somehow forgotten how to do
that little thing.
David played with it for a
bit, and then, music! “It was on sleep mode, for some reason”, he said. Well, I
looked at it and realized no….it hadn’t been on sleep mode before, but it was
now. This was confirmed when and hour later the music stopped. It only worked
on sleep mode, initiated by a little button which you press in the hopes of
going to sleep before the music shuts off.
I eventually found a station
where the DJ eventually said, “an update for those of you wanting one on the
Rogers’ situation. They are making progress, but they have no idea what
happened, nor any estimation as to when it will be fixed.” Yes, that in fact a
non-update kind of update. I don’t blame the DJ of course for the update that
was no update at all. I blame Rogers.
My daughter stopped in at
about ten to let us know that there was a lot of upset going around in the
community since folks who were Rogers subscribers wouldn’t be able to reach
emergency services, and some hospitals were stopped up because they couldn’t discharge
those patients scheduled to go home Friday as there was no way to reach those who
would be waiting to come and get them, or to receive them.
And just to make sure disruption
affected as many people as possible, debit card transactions didn’t work for the
most part, either. You could use your credit card at those terminals,
apparently, but not your debit cards.
David and I spent some time on
Friday, each of us writing, and then we did some reading. We didn’t get
frustrated. We just both of us figured out that if the problem was Canada-wide,
well, it likely wouldn’t be fixed anytime soon. We had a similar upset last
year, I believe, but it wasn’t quite as bad then as now. But that didn’t
matter. We were patient. We adjusted. It was a quiet day, in a way. No noise
from my cell phone at all, and David claimed the “silence” outside as he walked
the dogs was somehow deeper and richer.
The cell phones were working
for the most part by Saturday morning. So was the internet, although a few
links were not. But the television wasn’t working properly until Sunday
morning. And then, just to remind us how lucky we had been, it acted up all of
Monday night, too.
And I suppose, that while I didn’t
feel stressed going with no television on either Friday or Saturday, I
must really have been. Early Sunday morning, we went out to get our groceries.
We came home, put them away, and then went into the living room, turned on the
TV, and tuned in to our usual “talking heads”, programs that we record so that
we can fast forward through the commercials. And there they were! Our familiar
broadcasters of all things news and politics. We were “in touch” at last!
We both were dozing off within
minutes. Apparently, it wasn’t the information I lacked during the outage that
stressed me—that stressed us both. No,
it was the lack of just the right droning voices to accompany our little
afternoon catnaps.
Thank goodness, life is back
to normal.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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