Two Quick Ways to Hose an Online Business

I just love living in the land that time forgot — not!  Yesterday afternoon, the power went off twice, for a total of about 2.5 hours.  The first time we were without power for about 1.5 hours.  Since this happened around lunchtime, I went out for a bite to eat, but came home empty-handed.  The entire city was without power.  So, it was PB&J for me for lunch.

When it was restored, it took me about 15 minutes or so to power up all of my office equipment.

Then, a scant hour later, bam!  It goes out again.  For all practical purposes, my entire afternoon is lost at this point.  I turned off and unplugged everything again and decided to catch up on some reading.

I had finished my reading and was just dropping off to sleep when the power came back on again.  By this time it was close to the end of my workday, so I decided I was taking a nap rather than powering everything back up again.  I just really didn't have any confidence that the power would stay on.  Well, it did, as I discovered when I woke up 2 hours later..;->

The power outage wasn't due to any bad weather.  Apparently a transformer station caught fire.  Fun stuff.

So, today I'm back up and running and try to make a phone call from the house phone and discover there's no dial tone.  Eric then told me he lost DSL service earlier today. I hadn't noticed because we have a second broadband connection in our house that's cable broadband from Time Warner cable for my business, and my phone service is through Vonage. I report the outage to AT&T and they tell me that the repairs will be made by next Thursday, a week away!  That's completely ridiculous.  Phone service is out over a large portion of town — businesses can't survive without phones for a week!

We had this situation with phone service outage happen during Hurricane Rita in 2005, but that was understandable, as that hurricane devastated this entire area.  This particular outage has been caused from someone cutting through a major phone line while doing construction downtown.

The great irony in all of this is that I keep an AT&T  landline for my biz that I rarely use as my "hurricane" phone.  After Hurricane Rita, AT&T (then called SBC) had the phone service back up and running in 2-3 weeks. It took Time Warner Cable about 3 months to restore cable service.  As my phone and Internet connections stand now, I'm in big trouble if another hurricane lands in SE Texas if Time Warner hasn't improved its ability to recover from disasters.

So, here we sit again, without access to a major utility.  That's all it takes to really hose your online business — take away your power and take away your phone/Internet access.

Think I can advertise with smoke signals?? LOL