When the Web breaks in the islands

OMG, MY INTERNET WAS DOWN FOR A WEEK. Need I say more?

It’s true that many of us spent much of our lifetimes communicating on phones that weren’t any smarter than Bevis or Butthead, and we survived. But that was then.

These days, especially if you live on a remote little rock, home Wi-Fi is what keeps you in touch with the rest of the planet, the World Wide Web that keeps us island spiders fed — with news, with social interaction, with Wordle and the Sunday Crossword, with televised entertainment that streams as easily as the tidal current in Rosario Strait.

Until the Wi-Fi goes dark, as it did about 10 days ago.

As removed from population centers as my Nuthatch Cabin may be, it is served with most of what we call the “mod cons.” Potable water fills the sink when I turn a faucet handle. The toilet flushes. Buried power lines set lights ablaze. Other underground wires bring land-line phone service and, yes, DSL Internet, courtesy of CenturyLink, the Louisiana-based telecom.

Through some convoluted happenstance of old-school technology from the 1990s, never before have my land-line phone and the Internet gone dead at the same time. When it happened this time, I knit my brows.

Already after regular office hours that Thursday, a cell-phone call to CenturyLink led me to a text exchange that I strongly suspect was conducted by an AI entity at the other end. There were too many formulaic responses. Whomever was helping me, I’ll call them “the entity.”

The entity first tried to set a repair appointment a week in the future. It ignored my protests that I depended on my Wi-Fi for keeping linked in so many ways to the outside world. That continued until our text exchange was winding up and I was asked if my problem had been addressed satisfactorily.

“No, the week wait isn’t acceptable,” I texted.

And suddenly the entity found it possible to schedule an appointment for the next day. I explained that I lived on an island with challenging access and offered suggestions for how a repair tech could get here. “I’ll add that to the report,” the entity told me.

All good, it seemed. The problem was that I sat at home all the next day waiting to hear from a repair tech, who was supposed to arrive before 5 p.m. At 4 p.m., CenturyLink texted me that its technician had visited me but was unable to gain needed access to the inside of the premises. Patently false; I hadn’t left home all day. Nobody had showed up.

I got on the phone to a live human being this time. From the accents encountered in several calls, I’m guessing the call center was in India, or maybe Sri Lanka. Bangladesh? Understanding their patois was a challenge. My only comfort was that I could have been trying to wade through a Louisiana drawl thick as gumbo.

Surprise, they now told me, 24 hours after my first report: The problem had been identified as an area outage, affecting more than just my residence. No, they couldn’t say how wide an area was affected. They had no idea when it might be fixed.

That was late Friday, May 10. The call center was closing for the weekend. I would wait, vaguely hoping someone was working on Center Island’s outage. And over the weekend I would watch old DVDs instead of streaming the latest from Netflix. I would walk across my island to check my email at the clubhouse, which is served by Elon Musk’s satellite-based Starlink Internet. (As much as I’ve tried to ‘X’-out Musk from my life, I ruled out switching to Starlink only when I learned that not only would it cost me $25 more per month, but I would have to invest in $600 worth of equipment. And neighbors told me that tall firs on our side of the island make for poor Starlink reception anyway.)

Monday morning I phoned South Asia again. Another new development: My area outage had been repaired, they now claimed. But my phone and Internet are still dead, I protested.

OK, we’ll set up a new repair visit, my customer-service rep said. For the end of the week. “For tomorrow,” I insisted. OK, for tomorrow. Not once did I hear an apology for Friday’s no-show.

Just out of curiosity, I phoned the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission consumer complaints office, which oversees telecoms. Legally, I could file a complaint two business days after a phone outage, a staffer told me. That meant the end of Monday. But CenturyLink had a poor record of quickly resolving complaints — it could take months — and the commission’s enforcement powers seemed weak.

Tuesday morning I finally heard from the repairman, a gentleman named Armando whose 360 area code indicated he was actually calling from this hemisphere. I told him I’d heard that several of my island neighbors had also lost their CenturyLink service. That was news to him. Mine was the only service request, he said.

He’d secured a plane ride that day to neighboring Decatur Island, which he would have to visit first. Apparently there’s some sort of switchbox on Decatur that controls service to Center Island.

Then he’d need a boat ride to Center Island. That was a problem. My boat was on its trailer, out of the water, and a fluke of the tides was such that water would not be high enough all week to use our launch ramp in daylight hours. I suggested he hire a water taxi. He was unenthusiastic.

I hung up, thought about it for a minute, and phoned a neighbor to ask a favor. His boat was at the dock, and the ride across the bay to Decatur was only 5 minutes. He agreed to help, so I called back to Armando, who said he’d probably be ready for a lift in 20 minutes. He would phone to let me know.

Two hours later, after more than one try, I got through to Armando again. Oh, it appears that all Center Island customers have lost their service, he told me. (Surprise.)

And here’s some irony. It happens that, as a result of the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, San Juan County-based Rock Island Communications won grants to expand fiber-optic broadband service to 1,000 island residents, including us folks on Center and Decatur islands. The digging of trenches and laying of cable had already begun on Decatur Island. And guess why CenturyLink’s old-school DSL service went out?

Yep, while laying lines, the forces of new-and-improved cut the old cable. Oops.

Armando told me he didn’t know where the cable was severed, but that the problem was clearly on Decatur. The good news: He didn’t need a boat ride. But he offered no optimism for a repair.

Bad, bad news, I thought. Why would CenturyLink now want to spend potentially big bucks to fix a broken line serving only a handful of customers on a little island nobody’s heard of? Admittedly, my neighbors and I will all likely abandon their antiquated service as soon as broadband switches on (at $10 less per month, with much faster uploads and downloads).

Commiserating with another Internet-less neighbor at our clubhouse, I learned that CenturyLink had scheduled him for a service call the next day, Wednesday. I wondered if that offered any hope.

I guess it did. Around 1 p.m. Wednesday, my long-silent land-line phone rang with a loud electronic burble. “It lives!” I shouted to Galley Cat as I ran to pick up the call. Leaping frantically from the cozy bed atop her kitty condo, Galley apparently didn’t share my thrill. (She’s always been a Luddite.)

Armando was calling from Decatur Island. The broken cable was repaired. Service was restored. It was unexpected good news.

On reflection, I realize that while Internet is nice to have, I could survive without it. Just as I did for more than half my life.

Meanwhile, I had re-watched a bunch of old “West Wing” episodes on DVD. I love Joe Biden, but God, I wish Jed Bartlet was on the ballot this year.