Our office was down. A room full of dot-com programmers who can’t get to the internet? Not even the narconon folks know DTs like that.

Ours was down for half the workday. There is nothing like not being able to receive the documents you’re supposed to be working on and having clients calling up and screaming about why you haven’t responded to their e-mails.

I find that I freak out when my internet goes kaput ( I have AT&T too). I like the convenience of having answers at my fingertips. Anytime during conversations at home or watching something on TV I will run to the computer to verify something or to look stuff up but when it is down I get the shakes.

Heh. Tell me about it. My internet was fine but my computer went kaput last week and I couldn’t get a new one until Wednesday. One week without a computer! I described it here as “hell week.”

It was an interesting experiment, though. And I did get a lot done. I also found myself more annoyed than ever by the sucky mainstream media and their focus on the Democratic campaign, to the exclusion of just about everything else. Doesn’t anyone cover news anymore?

I guess because I get a constant fix at work (I currently have 6 browser windows running, not counting IM and email, of course) it doesn’t bother me as much when it dies at home (although, since I have dialup there, who would know?)

God knows how much more productive I was before the net - uh I mean thank heavens for this wealth of information at my very fingertips, boss!

I partially telecommute, so when my internet goes down (we’re Comcastic here) I start seeing dollar signs - as in lost dollars. So I freak from a money standpoint.

But I do have a much higher need to get on and just check into things - I didn’t even have internet at home when I worked full-time, just a few years ago!

I have three supposedly direct numbers to call for DSL technical problems/service. For the first hour they were all either unanswered or a recording asked me to call back later. After that the recording on all confirmed there was a major outage and the wait for an answer would be longer than an hour.

I find it very interesting that the largest telecommunications provider like ATT has circuit overloads. Hmmmmm.

Before internet, people just resigned themselves to the reality of isolation - Being a Mr Mom during the day and working at night kills any chance of social interaction, as one example. Suffering from social anxiety is another. But the internet solved the problem of loneliness. But, cutting off our internet re-exposes us to those good ol days - to which we no longer have a way to cope with, and we find ourselves lost in a world of social suffocation.

Well, those of us who work 100% from home & can’t work when the ‘Net goes down sure don’t like it.

And speaking of AT&T, I’m curious if this is true of Nashville AT&T DSL users too…

Before AT&T took over BellSouth, my DSL almost NEVER went down. It was a huge rarity for it to go out at all.

Now, whenever it storms or even just rains a little hard, it’s going out CONSTANTLY, off and on every few seconds for a couple of hours during one of our more recent big storms.

I probably wouldn’t think a thing about it except - when it was still BellSouth, it practically NEVER went down, ever.

So just wondered if anyone else who’s been a customer a while has noticed an increase in outages. Again, for those of us who not only play but work from home, stuff like this isn’t cool. I really don’t wanna switch ISPs again but I may have to if this doesn’t improve.

And seconding what News2 said about the phone stuff. Actually, BellSouth had a WONDERFUL automated line before & I never had to speak with a person because the message on the automated line always told me whatever I needed to know.

Now with AT&T? Pretty terrible. Last time I just hung up because I wasn’t getting anywhere but going around in circles.