All in one evening... True life story of restoring an internet outage.

Soooo you ever have your internet go out and you think, “those darn ISPs, they don’t do anything”

Its 10:30PM, I am about to go to bed. I check my dashboad app (which gives me health of our service over the whole county reduced to a single page) and there is a bunch of red that popped up in the last 20 minutes.

I jump out of bed, get dressed and go to downtown Winslow.

The particular spot where the service has issue is under a 90 year old building built on stilts. It has been an auto garage, multiple hair salons, restaurants. There is “interesting” remodel work to navigate - sewers roughed in, ad-hoc storage, dangling power lines - it is a mess. I crawl to the equipment and verify we have a power outage. At that moment I noticed a thumping noise above me. That’s odd, all stores closed hours ago… We have battery backup so the outage should have been reported and there was nothing on the PSE app.

I climb out and find that a restaurant (we serve) has a cleaner removing the year’s accumulated grease from the vent hood (It is a fish fry joint, imagine the smell). Everything is taped/curtained off like a hazmat site. The guy running the pressure washer is on his 3rd circuit that he has tripped and moved on to another outlet… You can’t make this stuff up.

I reset our breaker and set my clock for 5AM to make sure I didn’t have to go down again. I had a quiet morning.