I went into town yesterday afternoon to do some grocery shopping, and while I was gone a line of thunderstorms came through the area. I assume they were part of the trailing edge of Hurricane Beryl, which had so much fun in the Caribbean earlier this month and is now disappearing into Ontario as a diffuse low-pressure system.

I got home to Schloss Bodissey just as the storm broke, and was barely able to get the groceries into the house before the rain started bucketing down. The storm was dramatic, with plenty of thunder and lightning, but no significant wind — just a welcome two inches of rain. The electricity never went out. I checked the phone when I came in, and it was still on.

However, after I put the groceries away, when I sat down at the computer to resume work, I discovered that the internet was out. All that lightning and thunder must have scared away the demons that run the local server.

It is often the case that the internet comes back on overnight without my needing to take action. Since making a tech support call to the phone company is a pain in the [nether orifice], I decided to wait until morning, and went to bed.

When I got up this morning, the light on the modem was still red. I fortified myself with breakfast and coffee and began the ordeal of calling tech support. It’s a grueling process — you have to go through a seemingly endless series of robot menus, some of which take touch-tone inputs, while others require voice. After responding to all the standard questions about power-cycling the modem and so on, I was finally transferred to a human being. In this case I was very fortunate to be referred to Pedro rather than Jamsheed — the Latino support people are much easier to understand than the guys with thick Bangladesh accents.

After talking to the tech I had to endure waiting on hold repeatedly while being forced to listen to horrible music. That took about forty-five excruciating minutes. Finally he told me that the soonest he could send a technician out would be tomorrow between 8am and 5pm.

Which is ridiculous, because all they have to do is send a guy out to reboot the rain-soaked server. But there’s nothing a mere customer can do. They don’t care. They don’t have to care. They’re the phone company.

And then, mirabile dictu, the internet mysteriously returned about two hours after I got off the phone. You never can tell.

I’m way behind in everything, obviously. I’ll read all the email and put up a bunch of posts, and there will be a news feed before midnight.

Unless another storm comes through.