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No internet? What ever will I do?

As I type this I am alone, disconnected from the world.

My fibre broadband has been down since early Tuesday afternoon and Spark has no idea when it will be up again.

Of course before ringing the fault line and facing a wait of almost 30 minutes in the queue (yes, I opted for a call-back) I had already one the basic diagnostics and rebooted both the router and the ONT -- to no effect.

I even went so far as to check the Spark network status page using the wife's smartphone with its cellular data connection. The fact that this still worked seems to indicate that it wasn't a particularly widescale outage to the extent that it affected the local towers.

Sadly, the network status said there was no problem in my area -- but I knew, from experience that this means nothing. Almost every time there's been an outage it takes hours to show up on the network status page.

[UPDATE] it's now been 18 hours since the fault began and it's still not showing on the Spark network status page. If Spark was smart enough to update this page then they'd probably save themselves from having to deal with a snot-load of fault-reports from the affected area. Who's running this circus?

When I finally got my callback, and only after he'd verfied my identity by asking for my date of birth, the password to my OnlyFans account and other such unique identifiers, the nice chap with the Indian accent told me he'd check my line.

"Oh, there seems to be an outage in your area" he told me.

Things I already knew -- despite the network status page insisting that "everything's fine".

Mean time to repair?

Hahaha... of course I knew he'd have no idea and his response confirmed this.

So it's now been almost 18 hours since my fibre went dark; how have I coped?

Remarkably well.

Nobody in this household is addicted to social media and we've already discovered that streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video and the like aren't worth the money they charge so no worries from that perspective.

Fortunately I had paid all the outstanding household accounts and transferred some money to my transactional bank account before I went out in the morning so that wasn't a concern either. I only perform such tasks on a desktop computer -- I don't trust smartphones for that sort of thing, especially not the wife's one because she has the Wish.com app and goodness knows what else.

To keep the old sheila happy, I plugged a USB hard drive into the TV set. This is the drive I've been ripping our DVD collection to and it already has several hundred movies on it. She was happy -- more movies than any of the streaming services offer and all for for the affordable monthly price of $0.00.

As for me... well I tried to catch up on some programming work that I've been putting off for quite some time and this was going well until I needed some documentation for the libraries I was using. Normally I just call those docs up online and leave them displayed on another screen. Obviously this wasn't possible so I gave up on that task.

Instead, I edited up some videos I've been working on and now they're sitting, ready to be uploaded to YouTube when photons start flowing through my fibre again.

I do have a 4G wirless hotspot device that Spark actually gave me when there was a delay in getting fibre installed at this house but unfortunately it wouldn't work. I suspect that because it hasn't been used for a few years the SIM in it was no longer valid. That's a bugger.

Not being able to send or receive emails has been a bit of a pain, I normally spend the first hour of every day simply performing this essential task -- not today.

Today is also the worst day of the week for me to be without a connection because I normally participate in a YouTube livestream and a couple of online conference sessions with groups I consult to about drone matters overseas. There's also the final session of our present council and I really wanted to record the livestream just in case there are any fireworks that later get conveniently "lost" and never make it into the archived copy.

Hmmm... if I was a conspiracy theorist I might speculate that the council contractors laying pipes in an adjacent street were instructed to sever the fibre as insurance against me capturing the livestream of that meeting -- but no, that would never happen, would it?

Right now I guess people are wondering why I don't use my smartphone for essential stuff, given that there is still cellular internet connectivity. Well the answer is that my smartphone doesn't even have a SIM card in it. I get all the connectivity I usually need via my simple little bar phone that goes five days without the need for recharging and fits nicely into the hip pocket of my jeans -- something a smartphone will never do.

I could think of nothing more annoying than having a bulky smartphone in my pocket while doing my 5-10Km of walking every day and I find the ergonomics of smartphone use incredibly annoying. I see that some people are able to type really quickly on their smartphones, using nothing but their thumbs but I get really frustrated when using that stupid little screen-based keyboard to enter stuff.

Perhaps it's just that I'm old and fixed in my ways (like most old people). However, on the up-side, I suspect that many people younger than myself would go insane if they lost access to Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and all their other favourite social media sites for more than an hour. Me? Well I consider this a well-deserved break.

Hopefully internet service will be restored before the end of today so I can upload this version of your daily dose before I write tomorrow's.

Carpe Diem folks!

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