I am at a job where I could literally do 98% of my work from home. I have VNC on every computer in the network and ssh on the firewall boxes so that I have an extra layer of connectivity. Recently there has been a problem.
It seems the phone lines for our house are down completely. You pick up a phone and there's dead air. We called the phone company and apparently there's a huge outage most likely affecting our whole neighborhood and possibly more. This means we're out of phone service too which stinks because I talk to my girlfriend every night. The remedy to that is I've been working every night about the time we talk, so luckily I haven't had any problems with that. I don't have a cell phone and are mostly against the technology in the first place but this is the only time I would ever put a cell phone in a positive light.
Without broadband, or a phone in general I can't connect to the computers at work. I would even hook up the modem if I thought it could at least let me transfer files and update a couple of things, but we're dead in the water. As it stands the only way I'm getting stuff from my home network to the work network is to transfer the files onto my laptop and then carry it into work. I got my girlfriend a usb drive for her birthday and this is one area where that would come in handy, but I'd barely use it if everything was functioning normally.
Luckily I've had the “pleasure”, if you want to call it that, of working with a phone company and knowing how telecommunications works. They have maintenance windows every night from roughly 2 am to about 5 am, give or take a little bit depending on the company. Most likely the problem is one of two scenarios:
- Fiber/Cable cut - This was the catch all phrase we used at Bellsouth.net to tell when there was a problem. There have been very few cases of someone actually severing a cable. We used this for everything from hosing a router to a configuration problem on our end. Because we didn't want to give umpteen customers their money back, this “excuse“ usually helped keep people in check.
- Telecommunications equipment is built for remote control. Every analog switch is “managed“ in the same way an ethernet switch can be managed. So most likely some person making “updates“ happened to crash the switch. When this happens and the hardware is old enough, they'll sometimes use the downtime to replace decade old (or older) equipment.
When we called we were given an automated prompt that said it would be fixed by 8pm Tuesday. Since Tuesday and Thursday are the days I work from home, I don't know how much I'll actually get done.
The good part about Telecommunications companies are for the most part they're a 24/7 company so I'm sure whatever the real problem is, they have people working around the clock to fix it. I really don't care if someone dropped the box on accident, or a real issue beyond their control is what brought down our service, I just want it back up. Of course if this kind of thing were to happen all the time, I would be very suspicious of what they said the problem was and what the actual problem would be. I know all Telecommunications companies lie in this fashion, so Bellsouth (the one we use) aren't particularly singled out here. In my dealings with UUNet and Worldcom, the same type of “corporate protection” was in place to make sure everyone and their mom wasn't credited for loss of service.
To be honest though, I couldn't handle lying to customers on a daily basis. My primary job function was to answer phones and if there was an outage, I had to think of a lie or in many instances I had to get someone else to give me the right words to say. I can't just lie because it's the thing to do, I have to lie because there's a reason I personally don't want to tell the truth. These were hard working individuals in the same boat I found myself in, and I did not want to lie to them. These people reminded me of my family or friends, and because I would personalize everyone I talked to, I actually felt sorry for them on many occasions.
I can't work for a company that does that any more. If you can't own up to your problems and have to lie to keep from giving the service you promised, then what's the point of being a company or having service agreements in the first place? The only one who benefits from the scenario is the company involved. With an ISP you pay to be on their network. They already charge way more than they should, but on top of that they try to find ways to cheap you out of getting money back for poor service. I don't honestly see why these companies are still around personally. I firmly believe that their ethic is what eats away at them internally and I wouldn't be surprised if Bellsouth went under, even as big of a corporation as it is. Any company based on lies and deceit doesn't really have that long before it starts to choke the life out of the company. You don't need too many examples to see the pattern it forms.
You realize how much you need connectivity when it's gone. I thought dial-up was bad, but having no phone is far worse.