Infamy

Wednesday, January 14, 2026, will long be remembered as the day when the cell phones stopped working for half the day, and oh my heavens! The weeping and wailing!

It was just after noon when I looked at my phone and saw "Emergency Calls Only" where it usually says "Verizon." I tried to figure if I had fatfingered something wrong, but then Peggy said her phone said the same thing, so I figured it was some network outage. 

Within minutes, two great teams went to work on the problem. First, the network engineers, who, some 12 hours later, figured someone unplugged something or the whole network needed to be rebooted or whatever, and then the public relations all-stars went to work, putting out soothing messages about how "we know this is an inconvenience to your day" and "our people are working to restore service as soon as possible." My guess in these techie things is that someone had to call home and ask their 17-year-old kid what to do. As always, one of them knew, and then went back to watching his K-Pop.

This is not a picture of someone with the measles. It's a chart of the Verizon snafu.

This morning, we awoke to news that Comcast was going to give us all 20 bucks for the inconvenience, but the last I saw, we had to go online and submit a request for the double sawbucks. They know exactly who was out and who should get the 20 simoleons, but they're going to make us work for it.

I should ask that bigshot's kid how to get my twenty.

And oh yes, it was fun to be back in 1991 again - no phone, no text, nada. My landline still worked, though, and this is why I told Peggy I will never ever again ask if we can get rid of it. You can call us to hear how we feel about that landline! It's either 1-800-DONTNEED IT  or 1-800-GLADWEHAVEIT.