So the internet's been back for two days now and I'm still annoyed about it, which probably means it's time to write it down and get it out of my system.
Saturday night, right in the middle of Jonas dumping something like two and a half feet of snow on this part of the world, my cable modem just gave up. Not the power: the power flickered twice and came right back, we got lucky there compared to some of the reports coming out of New Jersey. It was the internet. Xfinity's status page (once I could load it on my phone, on data, at like 1 bar) said "service issue in your area," which is the ISP equivalent of a doctor saying "you'll live" and walking away without telling you what's actually wrong.
I want to say this taught me some big lesson about redundancy and disaster preparedness, but honestly it just taught me that my "backup plan" was a phone hotspot and a prayer. I bought one of those little battery backup units for the router back after Sandy in 2012 (I remember writing about it here at the time, all proud of myself) and I genuinely could not find it Saturday night. Four years, one move, and apparently zero times actually testing whether the thing still holds a charge. It's probably in a box in the closet next to the extension cords. That's the whole post right there, honestly: I own the gear, I just don't maintain it, which is worse than not owning it because it gives me false confidence every single time.
Central Park ended up somewhere around 27 inches, which puts Jonas right up near the top of the list for snowiest storms the city's ever recorded, behind the 2006 one. Governor Cuomo shut the roads down Saturday afternoon, subways went above ground only for a while, and half of Twitter turned into people posting pictures of drifts up to their car doors. My street didn't get plowed until Monday morning, so anyone who wanted to leave the neighborhood before then wasn't going anywhere anyway, internet or not.
What actually got me through the outage, weirdly, was that I'd downloaded a bunch of podcast episodes Friday afternoon out of habit, not because I saw the storm coming and planned ahead like some kind of responsible adult. Pure luck. Meanwhile my partner had three different work Slack threads she couldn't check and was pacing around the apartment like a caged animal, which, fair. When your job lives entirely in the browser, a dead modem during a blizzard is basically a forced vacation day nobody asked for.
The thing that bugs me most, now that it's Tuesday and everything's back to normal, is how bad the communication was the whole time. No estimated restoration time, no update when it actually came back (it just started working again around 2am Sunday, I only know because I happened to be up), nothing. Compare that to the power company, which at least sent texts — wrong ones, sure, the restoration estimate kept sliding by six hours every time it updated, but at least it was something. I'd rather get a bad estimate than silence. Silence just means you refresh the status page every twenty minutes like it's going to say something different.
Anyway. I did finally dig the battery backup out of the closet last night. It's dead, obviously, four-year-old lithium battery sitting untouched in a box, so now I've got a new one on order, and this time I'm actually going to plug it in and test it instead of just owning it as a concept. I'm not going to pretend I'll remember to check it again before the next one hits, because I know myself, but at least for the next storm I'll have an excuse ready.
If you're in the area and also dug out this week: hope the plows got to you before Monday. If you're somewhere that just watched this on the news and thought it looked fun, it was not fun, it was mostly just cold and boring and I ran out of things to read by Sunday afternoon.