High-Tech Dependency

Tonight I was going to blog about my experience at a friend's forge today replete with photos I took.
Unfortunately, tonight my Charter Bundle (internet, telephone, and cable television) all failed for a few hours so that will have to wait until tomorrow night.

We moderns are pathetically dependent upon high technology.
Three major functions of my household failed tonight due to a smoking box down the street.
Had I not had a cell phone and had needed 911 I would have been in trouble as the phone was dead.
This Charter Bundle saves me a whole lot of money but it also makes me even more vulnerable to the precocious whims of high technology than when I had a different provider for phone than for my cable television and high speed internet.

How tonight's episode played out was actually kinda cool.
I was on my cell phone talking to the very friend whose forge I visited today and I noticed my internet connection died at one point as we talked while I sat at my computer.
My first reaction was concern that it was a failure of my equipment so I tried unsuccessfully to reset my connection to the internet.
I then began to feel the problem was elsewhere as has happened before so I was a bit relieved.

A short time later I took a break in my phone conversation with my friend in order to switch the conversation over to my home phone but found it as dead as a doornail.
I then checked my cable television and found it was out, too.
This gave me upmost confidence the cause was Charter Communication's problem and not mine.
I was relieved as I can ill-afford another expense like that right now.

A bit after that when I had finished up my conversation with my friend I called mom to see if her cable television was out and she informed me it was not.
I then called Charter Communications and found out there was indeed an outage in my immediate area and they were working on it.

Not too much later I was out taking some house trash out to the waste bins and low and behold a service truck with a man-lift/cherry-picker came up the street and through the glare of my lights out front I could make out it was a Charter Communications service vehicle.
This made me very happy as you might imagine as they were indeed clearly on it aggressively.

A short time later that truck and two others like it rumbled down my street and all parked a few houses down with great fanfare replete with floodlights and flashing lights and headlights and slamming doors and people talking and noises of trucks backing up and going "beep, beep, beep" and so on.
I decided to get my flashlight and put Tequila on her leash and walk down there and thank them for leaving their homes and coming out and fixing my problem and to see what exactly happened.

As I walked down the street and approached all the hub-bub up I realized these guys were like the keepers of the flame of technology.
The flame of high technology had flickered low tonight in my neighborhood and they were here to get it vigorously burning again.
The movie Quest For Fire came to mind: how pathetic is that?!

Anywho, I walked up and thanked the three fellas for coming out to help me which they acknowledged with the two of them standing in their man-lifts wearing helmets with attached flashlights both suddenly looking down at me and consequently illuminating me while slightly blinding me which struck me as sort of funny for some reason.
I then asked them what the problem was.
They replied that they didn't yet know but one of them mumbled that whatever it was it was in the metal box up on the pole they were looking at from their man-lifts.
As I turned away one of them said that a certain box was smoking and asked the lone technician standing on the ground if he had one in his service truck to which he responded in the affirmative and went to get it as I walked away to head on up the street to my home.

Not long after that everything came back on line and the service technicians working down the street left and quiet descended upon the neighborhood once again.

Our modern high-tech system is so fragile that all it takes is for one link in the chain to break and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Fini