A sad..., sad message
No…, not by choice. An early morning lightening storm over a week ago Wednesday (8/10/22) caused a loss of CenturyLink phone and internet service here on The Ranch. I am still not sure how big an area was effected…, with no phone or internet access we couldn’t determine if it was just our place or if there was a bigger problem. On a trip to town for mail and groceries I asked a convenience store clerk, grocery store clerk, post office clerk, public utility district clerk, and hardware store clerk if they knew anything about the CenturyLink outage…, to no avail. That evening Julie had her daughter use her cell phone to call the CenturyLink toll free number and we found out via automated response, that there was “an outage in our area” and it was estimated that it would be repaired by the following morning.
No big problem…, we thought. But by Friday afternoon we still had no phone or internet access. I generaIly spend a few hours on the internet every morning with my coffee…, checking the weather forecast, stock market, oil price, Google News, email, several blogs that I follow…, and of course…, Facebook. I really did not want to miss my Friday Nite Video song posting on Facebook. I do it regularly because I don’t post much or share much during the week. So…, I went to town to the local library and asked to use a computer. I showed them my 20+ year old card…, that I was actually surprised that I still had in my old wallet. On the CenturyLink website I was only able to get the “canned” response of…, “sorry, there is an outage in your area” and the estimated repair date was…, you guessed it…, “tomorrow morning”. I wanted to communicate with someone in person so I could find out how large an outage and just what the problem was. Yeah…, right.
I really didn’t expect the problem to be resolved over the weekend…, but nothing Monday…, or Tuesday. I began to wonder if maybe the big problem was now solved…, and maybe we had a personal issue. One lightening strike was particularly close and lit the place right up. I was afraid that it had fried my computers…, but the power surge just shut them down. It did knock out the phone and internet service though. I was missing the internet…, but my biggest worry was the phone. A month or so ago Julie’s doctor called a couple days after an appointment and said the the lab report on her blood work had come back…, and she should get down to the hospital emergency room right away. It proved to be unnecessary…, but something like that or a family emergency could occur. So we went to town to our friends house and Julie’s friend said that she had called five or six times and left messages and was beginning to worry when Julie had not returned any of the calls. I got on their computer and got the “canned” response again…, “sorry, there is an outage in your area” and the estimated repair date was…, you guessed it…, “tomorrow morning”. There was a link for…, “if you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain further”. Of course I hit the link and got a little testy with the verbiage I used. I got a little automated “canned” response that I didn’t care for…, so I submitted another even more testy “complaint”.
