Outage

On Friday, one of Canada's telecom (n stuff) providers had an "issue" (aka they're not really talking about what did or didn't happen leading us to guess at information provided from unknown sources) and nationwide a bunch of stuff was knocked out.

What do I mean by "a bunch of stuff"?  A lot.  Seriously.  I honestly didn't keep up with it all.  Cell phones, internet, interac, ATMs, payment at stores (unless cash), e-transfers, 911 calls, access to all sorts of things and places.  A lot.

I was either lucky or smart or some combo of both and am not with the provider in any way and so wasn't actually all that affected.  I didn't need to get any groceries but when I chose to I had some cash on hand (a bit of a fluke, as I usually have some cash on hand for other reasons and had gotten more a few days ago) and credit cards were working again.  I have a land line (although they forced me to go digital a while ago which sucks) and my cell phone and internet were not affected so I was ok.  My land line phone and cell phone are with one company, my internet is with another, and neither of them are the one that had the issues (knock on wood so as not to jinx them).

Some people (and businesses) are still without service.  This has sucked for a whole lot of people.

I don't really know why I'm writing this post... to pat myself on the back for being lucky by choosing another provider?  To acknowledge that I don't know what it was like to go without phone or internet for a day?  To talk about things beyond my scope of knowledge like telecom monopolies and the weakness of our nationwide reliance on 'digital' stuff?

Back when I used to work customer service, things were automated sure, but if something went weird, you'd have to be able to either do math accurately or pull out a calculator to figure out what the machine hadn't (most often when you'd typed in the amount and people after the fact pulled out change and you'd have to recalculate what was owed or something like that.  Since then, I've witnessed lots of front end people at a loss when things weren't "fed" to them by the machine.  

I stayed with a copper wire phone line (until they shut that down) in case things went sideways with "digital"/fiber phone lines.

I always said I'd put my Mom on my zombie apocalypse team because she was medically trained before all the digitization and technology-ization and would be able to help us with medical without electricity and modern stuff.

I don't always have cash in my purse (although I do try to keep coins for coin based stuff) but I usually have some at home.  It now occurs to me that I should keep doing this for reasons like what happened the other day.  I feel naive now.

Of course there are what I would say are conspiracy theories around what happened.  And of course the doomsday people are saying I told you so.  And I suppose I'm a little like that in that I don't like to rely solely on technology even though the truth is I totally do and am.

So without being smug about it, I got lucky and was not affected by the massive, upsetting outage this weekend.  I hope changes are going to be made so that there are redundancies in place but I know they only help so much depending on what effs up.

Again, looking at this from a big picture kind of thing (while looking, for example at potential power/electricity issues in the states) puts me in a state of high anxiety so I tend to skirt around it... 

So to avoid the topic so I can slow my heartrate... I'm trying to rescue an aloe plant of Jason's that started to rot but I think it may be a disease as I just lost another leaf.... OK LET'S THINK ABOUT THAT INSTEAD OK BRAIN???