Actually, I know it’s just me, but these times are aggravating and the annoyance makes me prone to exaggeration.

I’m not exaggerating about this—you may see some strange things from me in the coming days. There never seems to be a good time for things to go wrong, but this might have been the worst.

My Internet connection has been down for five days now. On the day it failed I was in the middle of moving much of my online marketing from one company to another. I have no idea what those half-moved projects will look like.

I live in the country and all offsite services, such as electricity, satellite television, and Internet, go down more often than they do in the cities. Internet outages can happen several times a year. Usually, I just wait for the service to come back online. But this evening I wanted to finish the move to the new marketing service company so I called Dish the satellite television company that handles my Internet service.

The cheerful customer service representative told me that Dish was in the process of leaving the Internet business and that I would need to find a new provider.

“Why didn’t you tell me ahead of time?” I asked.

I expected the Dish representative to say that they had notified customers and that I had somehow missed it, but he didn’t. After a long pause, he simply said, “I’m sorry about that.”

I then called CenturyLink, the only real provider in this rural area. Dish had leased space on CenturyLink’s fiber and copper lines.

After I explained my situation, the CenturyLink employee seemed eager to help. We were soon discussing options. As they wrote down my information, I couldn’t help wondering why someone from CenturyLink didn’t phone and get this process started sooner. I guess they knew I would call eventually. The cheerful customer service representative concluded by telling me my service should be restored in ten days.

If you have used Dish or CenturyLink let me know how your experience has been in the comment section below.

The Internet is down – Again