Internet down for hours
"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.