Day 4 of no home Internet: AT&T still hasn't found the squirrel; I'm not sure they're really looking

I published my sad tale of home Internet loss on Monday evening. I'd figured out/remembered how to turn a cell phone into a hot spot by then. Thus, I had two hot spots -- the one under my collar and the aforementioned phone -- and a means by which to inflict my admittedly First World problem back upon the Internet itself.

I fancy myself a writer these days. Writers write. (At least, we're supposed to.) And, as Mark Twain may or may not have said, "Write what you know." (Maybe it was Hemingway who said it. Whatever. This sort of direction puts a person like me at a competitive disadvantage, given how little I know about anything. But I knew about not having Internet. So I wrote about that.) The trick, of course, is to frame one's complaints in a way that proves instructive or at least amusing for others. When successful, this raises the output from mere whiny journaling to something more. Not much more, perhaps (after all, it is still whining), but that is for the reader to decide. Either way, I found the exercise therapeutic.

Yesterday morning, still pleased with my effort, I Tweeted out a link to the post. (I still say "Tweet" when referring to a posting on X. If I were to write 'I X'd something out' it would be, in my view, ambiguous. Had I crossed something out, rendering it illegible, or had I launched it into the wider world on the social media platform now known as X?)

The X-post elicited a response from AT&T. A person who is probably not known as Emma to her actual friends and family left a comment which read, in pertinent part, "I completely understand how important it is to count on reliable connections and I truly apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to you. I'll definitely look into this. Could you please help me with the zip code?"

I provided it. Soon thereafter, Emma left another reply, "Thank you for sharing the zip code. As I have checked with the shared zip code there is no service interruption from our end." Welcome to Corporate America, where the customer is always wrong. But I was prepared for this; I had (you may recall) figured out how to sign onto the AT&T website and check for outages that way. I published a photo of my laptop screen, similar to the one above. Identical, really, except the one above is from this morning. I also published another screenshot, this one showing the area of outage. It's small. No more than a block or two in any direction. (Which is why I assume that a squirrel caused it, as opposed to the North Koreans or some piratical band of Eastern Europeans.)

Anyway, confronted with the evidence of her own website, "Emma" was forced to concede, "As per the picture it looks like there's an outage at your location. I'll definitely get this checked for you. Could you please meet us in a DM so that we can take this further."

Now I have to admit, despite Doomscrolling far more than I should on X, I have never used the DM feature to any great extent. My first mistake was thinking I was to find a way to DM "Emma." But that's not how it works. Eventually, I figured out that I had to DM AT&T itself. "Emma" was there waiting... but not for long. I also didn't know how or where to look for DM responses, so I didn't see her responses until after she completed her shift.

"Emma" was replaced by "Juan."

Hello, Jack. I understand that you are experiencing issues with the Internet service due an outage. We're really sorry to know about the situation you're experiencing. You can be sure our specialized tech team is working hard to get everything up and running as soon as possible.

I sparred with Juan for awhile yesterday afternoon and evening. He sent me back to the website which I've visited a hundred times in the last few days. Shockingly, it still showed an outage. It still does. Juan later insisted, "I've carefully reviewed and checked the area, we have our engineers working right now to bring the internet back on and repair all the lines damaged." He thanked me for my non-existent patience. Both Juan and Ella were unfailingly polite.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. My Internet is still out. It's a relatively nice day today here in Chicago; I could, and did, take a good long walk through the neighborhood this morning, looking for any specialized AT&T engineers. I didn't find any. And my Internet is still out.

On the other hand, I also didn't find a dead squirrel. Maybe finding the bloated, decaying rodent corpse is more difficult than one would think... but, then, I lack any sophisticated squirrel detection equiptment: I am not a specialized AT&T engineer.