Life without Internet… and cable… AKA: Cable Gremlins

I’ll freely admit that I have no idea what I’d do with myself if someone took my computers away. I get up every morning and, after fixing my first cup of hot tea, I check my emails. I write my blogs. I check my news feeds. Then I get to work.

My main business (the Fayette Front Page and the Georgia Front Page) revolve around computers. Internet access is a must.

So, imagine my displeasure when the weather got cold and I lost my Internet. And cable. When we had our first cold snap this year everything went down. I didn’t associate it with the cold at first. When I called first thing in the morning they said there was an area outage. It went off around 2 a.m., was back around 10 or so.

You expect that to happen on occasion. Things break down, accidents happen.

A few days later it happened again. Out around 2, still down when I got up. I called. They said it was another area outage. I was getting just a little, tiny, tad bit miffed but again, things happen, you expect to lose services at times.

The next day. It happened again. Temps dropped down to the 30s and our cable and Internet went out. Time for a service call because now they can’t find that there had ever been an area outage. Geez.

Our cable was just going out and then coming back on when it felt like it. I noted that it went back after the sun rose over the tree tops and hit the cable pole.

Hmmm, sound like the cold to you?

Well, let’s skip forward a full month. As I type this our cable and Internet are out for the tenth or eleventh time. Except now it’s getting more interesting. It went out last night at 10 p.m. and it’s still out.

We have cell phone numbers for the area cable maintenance guy and the area supervisor. We call them when it goes out. They zip over here to try and track down the problem.

So far they’ve rewired everything from the pole to the house. Twice. They’ve moved things, upgraded this or that, replaced things. It’s still happening.

We have the guys dropping everything and getting over here in 15 minutes now. They are all stumped.

The supervisor was over here last time. He climbed the pole, started checking things and voila it came back on by itself again. He was a little frustrated because it needs to be out for them to track down the problem.

I think we have a cable gremlin.