Yesterday. Yesterday was a challenge. Well, not the whole day, but a part of the day that mattered more than the rest, if that makes sense.

Like most people who are working from home these days, Zoom or Teams or whatever video conferencing platform you use is kind of an essential part of your job. Meeting with clients, meeting with your supervisors/teammates/co-workers, or meeting with potential clients is something that typically needs to be done several times throughout the day.

Yesterday, I was co-hosting a meeting (a training) with clients and the challenges of the day started shortly after the meeting began.

First, the video started to freeze and the sound was choppy. Then the internet just dropped altogether.

Gone. Kicked outta the meeting.

I frantically tried to reconnect, and within a minute or two I am back in the meeting. Apologies to my co-worker and clients.

15 minutes later I am dropped again.

This time, after waiting for over 5 minutes to get a signal back, I find there just is no internet at all. Damn. Wait several minutes, still no internet. Wait several more minutes, look to see if there is internet by staring at the router. It says there is WiFi, but of course that just means it is broadcasting not that there is data being transferred.

I tell my phone to stop using WiFi and then log into the Xfinity app. Sure enough, internet is down for maintenance in the area. Affected customers is between 51-500. “Expected restoration of services…” is an hour and a half. Seriously?

How about a little warning? Or, better yet, if this was an unexpected outage, how about a text message with info letting me know this info without me having to become a detective for the internet signal?

Thankfully the outage didn’t last as long as they estimated. The internet came back and I logged back into the meeting after 30 minutes. It appeared that I might get kicked from the meeting again after 20 minutes, but apparently they figured out something and I was able to co-host as expected.

The internet is obviously a necessity these days, especially when it comes to work.

But, when it don’t work, it don’t work. And neither do you.