Mother Nature, Comcast and the Wireless Frontier

We had a pretty severe storm blow through last night about an hour before our performance at Wayside Theatre. It knocked the power out for a few seconds and then it surged back on. We have a drill for this sort of thing when it happens about how we bring our systems back on line after tan event like this. That includes our theatrical equipment as well as our server and network.

As of last night it looked like the storm knocked Comcast off line locally, but this morning it looks like the modem might have gotten fried. We’ve been on hold with Comcast all morning which is frustrating. But there are other ways to reach out to customer service. I’m on Twitter via a smartphone with ComcastBill at the moment trying to get a solution going.

Meanwhile, for the office I’ve set up my Sprint MiFi card which serves as a decent backup. We’ve got two systems up accessing that at the moment.

It pays to have a back up plan and fortunately most of our employees can receive email via their phones as well.

Here’s the crazy in all of this. I have one employee still on hold with Comcast via phone. I’ve been going back and forth with ComcastBill via Twitter for about 20 minutes or so now and we’ve gone through the usual diagnostic steps. While I’m glad I can reach out and get assistance via Twitter, what a waste of time being on hold and it makes me feel for the folks who don’t use Twitter or know about how to do that.

It also reminds me that periodically we should replace surge protectors and check on our UPS to make sure they are up to snuff. I’m guessing we lost the modem or the router during the surge because of a failure of a surge protector.