You know you are about to talk to a human when you get the warning “your call may be recorded …”. It took about 30 minutes and four different phone numbers to get to that point after our AT&T U-Verse service went out at 4:45PM. A bit over four hours later, we’re reconnected to the tubes.

We have a technician visit scheduled for tomorrow between 8 and 12, but I have no way to tell AT&T that our connection works now. Sigh.

So why don’t they know that we are down? Why can’t they say that we were off line at 4:43 and traceroute fails at the San Antonio Road DSLAM? That technology is two decades old. I know, because I was doing it then.

Time passes. We are now upgraded to a “chronic outage” and have a competent senior tech visiting our house. He is sufficiently senior that he doesn’t have to wear an AT&T shirt. He also does clever things, like running a second line through our back yard rather than crawling under the house. I like this guy.

So, Internet, phone, and TV were down for five days. We have some sort of continuing interference problem between our DVD player and the broadband, where we can’t have the DVD player plugged in if we want any service at all. This is new, so I don’t think that our DVD player went rogue on Sunday afternoon.

I’ll be putting my EE degree and long-expired amateur radio license expertise to work solving that. On the plus side, we learned that TV is not essential to daily life, at least for a stretch of a few days.

And woot! Internet!