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April 30, 2007
Our Internet Goes *BOOM*
A Ditch Witch made our Internet her Bitch today.
Actually, it wasn't the Ditch Witch. And it wasn't the big back hoe. And it wasn't the smaller back hoe.
It was whatever that machine is they use to bury cable without having to dig up the whole road. They dig a small hole here and there where they have to check for gas lines and then push/drill pipe several feet beneath the surface along side of the road with some sort of pipe-laying machine. The whole thing is pretty cool and the guys doing the installation made it about 1/4 of the way down the road before they cut through the cable that provides our company with Internet service.
I made a call to Time Warner and, after some very brief troubleshooting (during which I described the back hoe out front and they did something that determined the outage seemed to be fairly localized to our company) they said they'd have someone out within four hours, per our contract.
I wasn't really too worried about the four-hour promise. I've had the same promise made twice before in the last eight years and it has never taken four hours and has been as quick as 15 minutes before a truck has arrived.
Today it took about 90 minutes but they sent two trucks. Or, if we average, about 45 minutes per truck.
As it turned out the cable wasn't cut in front of our building, but several buildings away. And it was cut beneath one of the concrete entranceways to a parking lot. There are no sidewalks on our street, just curbs and then lawn with a few entranceways here and there — very few.
I spoke with the Time Warner guys and they were pretty sure they'd have us up and running in fairly short order. And they did.
I called work from Jack's baseball game at 6:30 p.m. and one of the guys said he'd been surfing porn for about 20 minutes. So all was well. And I'm lying about the porn thing.
After the game I drove by the building to check on the repair. Right now we've got a cable running from one side of the of the entranceway in question, into the street and around the entranceway and then disappearing into a hole in the grass.
I imagine we'll have a more permanent solution after the heavy equipment moves on.
Posted by delmer at April 30, 2007 9:33 PM
Comments
OK, somebody is going to trip over that cable.
Posted by: The Phoenix at May 1, 2007 9:35 AM
Undoubtedly. Although, they have put cones up now.
Posted by: delmer at May 3, 2007 11:12 AM