Maximum Isolation

For one entire week our house was without tv, Internet and the landline phone. To make matters worse my cell phone reception is very spotty in the house.  It can really only be used by standing in the open doorway with your arm up in the air.  Not fun.  And not conducive to anything more than the most important and briefest of conversations. 

We lost electricity for a few hours on Monday morning.  When the power came back on, everything was working fine.  It was not until 5:00pm that night that we were in trouble.  Big Trouble with a capital "T".  After troubleshooting with Verizon and finding out that it would require a service call, we were told the earliest they would be able to come was Saturday.  WHAT!?!?!  Apparently we weren't in enough of a need to expedite a faster visit.  If you ask me, I thought we were in plenty of need.  But I guess our lack of life-support medical issues didn't constitute an emergency.  I get that.  And yes, it put it all in perspective.  But really, this 42 year old mom needs her tv.  She needs her Internet.  And she most certainly needs her phone.  As far as I was concerned, Verizon could have our electricity too.  What good was it if we couldn't connect to the outside world?

Can you imagine?  It wasn't pretty.  Quite ugly in fact.  Funny things happen when you can't be connected 24/7. Without "The Today Show" playing in the kitchen during my mornings, I lost all track of which day it was.  I put the trash out on the wrong day.  I had no idea what was happening in the world.  The only way I knew there was a two hour delay for school on Wednesday was because I got a text message from Fairfax County Public Schools.

I usually have the tvs on as background noise.  The silence was driving me crazy.  Coming home to a quiet house while the kids were in school was hard to take. 

Not a good combo - TV not working and a beautiful fire blazing in the fire place.

It seemed like I was the only one in my Toppall house that had an issue with the lack of Fios.  Jeff was gone at work at all day and had very little down time at home when he'd be watching tv.  The kids didn't complain at all that they couldn't watch tv.  Not one word was uttered from them during the whole entire week.  In fact, towards the end of the week they didn't even go downstairs to where the main tv is located.  The kids were very content to hang out in our living room reading and drawing/creating crafts.  How old school.  It was a bit refreshing to find out that Ian and Sam can easily take it or leave it, especially since we don't give any kind of limits on screen time.  But the person writing this blog was going through withdrawal.  Big-time!  I was waking up in the middle of the night with the shakes.  I had this list of everything I wanted to do as soon as I could connect again (pay bills, rsvp to evites, put a vacation hold on mail and newspaper, etc).  I didn't feel like myself.  It was like a part of me was missing.  I started sleeping with my cell phone on my nightstand, even thought I didn't have a chance of getting a signal.  Each day I would randomly turn on the tv and see if this bad nightmare had somehow resolved itself.  After 2 minutes, I'd be depressed all over again.

To help my situation, I did get a bit resourceful.  One night I went to Starbucks to use the Internet.  On Friday morning, I streamed the previous night's episode of "Parenthood" while working out at the gym.  That definitely helped me get my day off to the right start.   Overall the situation wasn't pretty.  I felt like we were living in 1985 and everyone else was in 2013.

Finally Saturday arrived and I knew I would make it.  Within 10 minutes of the Verizon guy walking in our house, our tv, Internet and phone were back up and running.  I ran around to each room and turned every tv on.  It was glorious hearing all the tvs working.  I picked up our phone and heard a dial tone while loading an Internet page on my iPad.  It was a beautiful thing to be connected again.

**Please take this blog entry for what it is -- a joke. While it was very challenging to not have tv, Internet or phone, I am fully aware that there are much bigger problems people face every day that don't go away as easily as service call from the Verizon tech.  I do have perspective and know how fortunate we were to have electricity during this Fios outage.  To have a roof over our heads and food on the table are the crucial things.  I get that.  :)