As usual, I woke my computer up as I prepared breakfast. My habit is to glance down the list of new emails that have arrived overnight, just on the off chance that something important has cropped up that needs my urgent attention. Nothing ever has, but the habit remains.

On Thursday morning, no email was to be had. Nothing was to be had, for that matter. Tsk, I tsked, the router probably needs a restart.

I restarted the router. Thrice. I rebooted the computers. All of them. Still no internets. That’s when I started to get uneasy.

Thing is, I know all about “internet addiction”. I’ve written about it enough times, snorted at the very idea of it, but never thought that perhaps I might be prone to it.

After 25 minutes on hold to the Pipex technical support line, I got through to a weary-sounding young man with an accent from roughly in the area of Manchester.

“It looks like you’ve been affected by this outage,” he said.

What outage?

“We’ve had a big network outage this morning. The engineers are working on it, hopefully they’ll get it fixed later today.”

How will I know?

“They’ll leave an announcement on the technical support line.”

Might have been an idea for them to leave an announcement there about this outage, mightn’t it? Then folk like me wouldn’t have had to spend 25 minutes on hold, would we?

“Yes I know sir, we have been saying that to them. You’re not the first customer to say that.”

Perhaps you might like to tell your management that there’s a party in a brewery they might like to organise soon.

“Yes sir, you’re not the first to make that joke either.”

To his credit, the young man at Pipex support clearly felt my pain and was as pissed off with his management team as I was.

But that didn’t stop me getting grumpier and grumpier as the day went on. Then, for a miraculous couple of hours, I was connected again. Joy! I hurriedly scurried around the net, conducting my usual online errands at twice their normal speed, trying to make up for lost time. I registered a new domain, filled out a form, subscribed and unsubscribed to stuff, but then: zap! Everything died again.

That’s when I started to get really cross.

It’s now six hours later, and I’m in a foul mood. What’s more, I can see exactly why, and I can see that I have no justifiable reason to be in such a grump. But dammit, I had things I wanted to do on the internets, and Pipex have taken my internets away, and I can’t do my things. I’m really pissed off about it.

And part of me can see how ridiculous that is. Part of me remembers the 1980s and the 1990s when I used to write letters to my friends, when I used to use public pay phones (even queuing up outside busy ones in student-infested streets), when I used to not know what was going on all over the world minute-by-minute.

You remember those days too: before any of us had RSS feeds to check, before any of us even suspected we would need to have “feeds” of “news” and “content” that update themselves automagically every hour or so, and which keep us informed of every tiny little detail of nothingness that we don’t really need to know.

I’m thinking about those days and remembering them fondly, and thinking that I should really shut down the computer and go read a book. I can’t though - I’m so angry about the lack of connectivity. All I can do is sit here typing, switching to my browser every few minutes and hitting refresh. Which does no good at all. I’m still not a part of anything, and won’t be until the apparently clueless management at Pipex manage to get a grip on what is evidently quite a bad day for them, too.