Not necessarily news
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Internet down for hours
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May 23, 2013 |
Much of North Idaho, including many internet
users from Kootenai County to the Canadian
border, lost their service shortly before noon
today caused by a disruption in a Frontier
transmission line, leading to near riots in many
communities as internet users, many not seen
outside for months, poured into the streets.
 "OMG!" said teenager Colleen Wembley, Coeur
d'Alene, aimlessly wandering in the street shortly after the first "page not
found" notice appeared on her screen. "OMG! OMG!
I mean, like, OMG!"
Some bewildered users shaded their eyes from a
sun they'd not yet seen this spring, noticed
clouds and asked if it had been raining.
"Snow?! Whattaya mean, snow?" said Mary Jean
Pretense, Bonners Ferry, when informed that many
areas of the county had, indeed seen snow over
the last two days. "I mean, it's spring, isn't
it?" she wailed. "It said so on
www.farmersalmanac.com!"
Hospital emergency rooms from Kootenai Medical
Center to Boundary Community Hospital were
filled to overflowing as stunningly pale people,
some screaming, others nearly catatonic,
streamed in seeking immediate help for a wide
range of maladies.
"I got what?" screamed one distraught patient at
a Sandpoint walk in clinic as the doctor
attempted to explain. "I don't care about the
symptoms!" he screamed, "just write it down so I
spell it right when Twitter comes back! ... Oh
no?! What if it never comes back?"
Several others sat shaking as nurses and
orderlies pitched in to bandage a great number
of index fingers
grossly swollen from repeatedly hitting
"refresh," some for hours.
"I rebooted my machine and everything," wailed
an old man with white, wispy hair, as a doctor
tended to his foot. "When the internet didn't
come back, I just booted it! OW! Easy, doc, I'm
pretty frail."
A number of fist fights broke out throughout the
region as cell phone users with good service
plans, who still had internet access, smugly
told desktop users all the gossip they were
missing. In classrooms, students sat frozen,
their access to Wikipedia gone.
One man of high standing even called the
governor's office, offering a large campaign
contribution if he could pull some strings and
get his email restored.
"If I don't reply within the hour," he screamed,
"that nice widow lady from Nigeria is going to
back out on the deal!"
He was still screaming incoherently as an Idaho
State Police officer escorted him from the golf
club.
Some of the most poignant and heart-wrenching scenes
played out in
area restaurants, where many seemed unable to
decide on lunch.
"What's the point in ordering if I can't tell
everybody on Facebook what I'm having?" screamed
a middle-age patron with prematurely blue hair
at the Badger Den in Bonners Ferry, breaking
into uncontrolled sobs.
Others simply folded their menus and sat
staring, wishing for simpler times.
Fortunately, as attested by the presence of this
exclusive on-line report, service was restored
several hours after the outage was reported and
things quickly returned to normal; ghostly
people slipping almost silently back into their
darkened rooms and mother's basements to their
assorted PCs and Macs to once again bask in the
LCD glow.
"OH YES!" one thirty-something basement dweller
sobbed as he logged in to Pinterest.
"We realize that this outage was a major trauma
for many of our internet customers as well as
those whose ISPs are served through our trunks,"
said Frontier spokesperson Charles Babbage. "As
soon as the report came in, we mobilized our
crack Urban Repair Logistics team (URL), a
highly trained response force with a hot line
directly to
Al Gore, inventor of the interwebs, who are on
standby around the clock for just such an event.
They were able to diagnose it quickly as a
"Highly Technical Technology Problem (HTTP).
Unfortunately, it did take longer to repair than
we had hoped ... Al wasn't home. LOL."
As it turned out, water from recent rains had
seeped into a main fiber optic trunk and seeped
into several arterial lines.
"When the fibers get wet, they swell and gum up
the optics," Babbage said calculatingly.
"Unfortunately, each fiber has to be removed and
individually blow dried, then meticulously put
back in the proper alignment for the optics to
flow."
Then he snickered, burst into a loud guffaw and
fell to the floor, rolling and maniacally
laughing his a** off.
He was treated at Kootenai Medical Center, where
he's being held overnight for observation.
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