This has never happened to me before, since going online about 12 years ago. I’m referring to an Internet outage which occurred locally in Malaysia yesterday. It affected thousands of users in four states—Perlis, Kedah, Perak, and Penang. I’ve learnt through experience that if my Internet conks out unexpectedly, the fault is usually at the ISP’s end, unless I forgot to pay my broadband bill (I have that on auto payment anyway). It went south about 4:30 PM local time yesterday, and dang—it was hard for me! To be cut off from the rest of the world, yikes! No email, no Windows Live Messenger, no browsing, ugh.
So I did the most reasonable thing. Called up the ISP, of course I had to wait—I guess they were deluged with calls from thousands of irate and frustrated Net users. I suppose it’s no point for me to vent my anger on them—when I finally spoke to someone they told me to wait it out. I go to bed, awake today, and boot up the computer. Any Internet? Nope, no luck. Still out. Called them again, they gave me the stock reply that their technicians were hard at work on it. Patience, patience. Alright, let me see—I’ll go do a mundane chore like ironing clothes. I pop in a Mahler CD into my computer—ah bliss. Bernard Haitink conducting Mahler’s 6th with the Berlin Philharmonic (what a fantastic performance). Soon I’m engrossed (yeah, believe it or not) with my ironing, until Network Magic beeps and that’s the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard—the Internet’s back! Yay!
What with the damaged undersea cables earlier this month and now this, I figured TM Net (my blessed ISP) should give a rebate or refund of this month’s bill to me. Yeah, dream on. As if they would be so gracious.
