I wanted, at the outset of this blog, to keep consistent for about the first week or so with at least one post per day to the blog.
I started out rather well, until yesterday afternoon.
Then, I ran into technical difficulties. Not with the blog, actually that was fine. I had looked in on it, and even gotten a comment from an online colleague. [Thank you again, Tom.]
No. Just as I was about to start writing up a post, I ran into technical difficulties with my Internet provider. Specifically, with my e-mail.
Technical difficulties has become more and more a part of the writing, and in fact other remote work, context in the Internet age.
This was particularly frustrating because I could see the list of e-mails, with several highly important incoming e-mails in two or three contexts but I could not access my Inbox.
I called the company’s Tech Support, and the Rep first determined that there were no line or speed problems or outages of that sort.
She and I then spent nearly two hours on the phone figuring out fixes for things on my computer that might affect my Internet and e-mail access. In fact, some of those things did need to be done . . . for one thing, the ISP I use doesn’t support Firefox and I haven’t figured out some of the functioning since the last time I upgraded my system.
She loaded both Chrome and Internet Explorer for me through desktop sharing, which improved performance all around.
After all that, however, she determined that indeed some of the malfunctioning was on the ISP’s end: the webpage itself had a malfunction and their techs were working on it.
The company gave an estimated “fix” time of up to 48 hours! Which I thought was outrageous. They allegedly were going to need at least 24 hours!
In the end, the complete outage lasted about 4-5 hours, but some functionality is still deteriorated today. I can now look at e-mails and send and forward them, but sometimes a Forward doesn’t apply the “Forwarded” tag. And I can’t copy text from one e-mail to another, such as running a business e-mail through an e-mail to myself to test whether or not it is garbled, as I got in the habit of doing with Firefox but may not need to continue to do with Chrome or Internet Explorer.
By the time I got done with Tech Support, at about , I was exhausted.
I actually wrote the next post [the one before this post] offline even then: but I knew I was too tired to tell if it sounded like something I should post so I left it until I could review it in a clearer state of mind.
An outage of that magnitude is rare for this Internet Service Provider. However, coping with this kind of issue in the days of remote and telecommute work also becomes part of t the landscape of both the writerly and the business world.
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