5 Lessons I Learned During a Weekend in the Dark Ages

This past weekend was one for the record books around here. I learned some lessons along the way so I thought I’d share this tale with you.

I woke up early on Friday, April 1st because I wanted to listen to a special radio program at 7am. I turned on the stereo in the living room and then I grabbed my iPad and none of my social media apps would work, I had no internet!

I turned on the TV morning news and found that there was a problem with AT&T cell phones (they were not working from about 7am-9:30am) but I have Verizon Wireless so that didn’t effect me. I knew that April 1 was the day Frontier Communications was taking over the Internet, TV and Landline service for Verizon so I texted Aaron, my son who works as an IT manager to see if he knew what was up. He said that the transition didn’t work for a large percentage of the Verizon customers and there was a lot of packet loss. He’d keep me posted. I took to Twitter and quickly learned the problems were centered in the 3 large markets Frontier was taking over, Tampa Bay, Dallas and Los Angeles. Since it was still early most of the trouble was notice in Florida because the other states are in later time zones.

A large part of the Frontier issue was fixed by 10:00am, but not where I live. I spent the majority of Friday on Twitter reading and responding to others using the hashtags #frontier and #frontierfail. Those that tried to reach Frontier’s customer service by phone were complaining of talking to people who did not speak English and who could not answer questions that didn’t follow their script. Many people often said they were hung up on after being on hold for 2 hours! The problems were similar for those trying to reach Frontier’s website on their phones. The chat didn’t work well at all.

I did receive an email from Frontier, based on my Twitter conversation and some DMs. They needed me to give them my Frontier account number. I don’t have an account number. I had received nothing from Frontier or Verizon telling me to create a new Frontier account prior to the switch over. This is another Frontier fail!

Our internet service was finally restored at 11:30am on Saturday, April 2nd 28.5 hours after it went down. I have since tried to create an account on Frontier’s website and every time I try I get error messages.

I work online from 11:30am-2:00pm on Saturday. By 2:00pm the cold front and heavy thunderstorms have arrived and I shut down my computer. At 3:00pm our electricity goes out! Really?!? By 5:00pm total boredom has set in and FPL is saying our power should be restored by 7:15pm. Hubby and I decide to head to the mall to walk around and get out of the house. At 5:50pm I get an update call from FPL telling me they had to call in professional tree trimmers and my power should be back on by 9:00pm. At 7:00pm we meet Jordan for dinner. We arrived home at 8:30pm. I take a shower by lantern light, which was very relaxing! At 9:30pm I check in with FPL’s outage service and it now says they no longer have an ETA of when our power will be back. Finally at 11:00pm, as we were heading to bed, the electricity came back on.

That was a total of 36.5 hours with no internet! Thankfully we have a lot of data in our cell phone package, while we didn’t stream or play games, we could at least keep tabs via social media without worry. I’m also thankful that I always keep my battery chargers for our phones charged. We all needed to charge our phones Saturday evening and we were able to do that.

Lessons Learned

1. Keep your backup battery chargers charged at all times.
2. Don’t obsess over the outage, take the screen free time to get other non-Internet work done (like house cleaning).
3. Keep an extra gift card on hand so you can afford to eat out if you have no electricity and no money in the budget to dine out.
4. Relax, don’t stress over things you have no control over.
5. Always have at least 1 fiction book on your Kindle app ready to read when the power goes out.

I know these were very #firstworldproblems and we are very fortunate to have everything we do have. This weekend proved to us how much we rely on internet and electricity and honestly, I think we rely on the internet even more than we rely on electricity! I hope that Frontier will get its act together because we didn’t choose them. We never had any issues with our Verizon FiOS and hopefully the rest will be smooth sailing with Frontier.

So, how was your weekend?