For three days, my husband and I could not breathe, eat, or drink.

That is an exaggeration. What happened was that we did not have internet (lowercase “i” according to The Chicago Manual of Style) service for three days.

Years ago, when I had a Facebook account, I read the following meme in my feed: Our generation is better prepared for a zombie apocalypse than an hour without electricity. This meme is terribly true and would have been even truer had its ending read …an hour without electricity or internet service.

No internet means no email. Email is my favorite method of communication. Yes, I also text and make the occasional telephone call, but since I love to write, I prefer to email. Often, my emails to my friends are extremely long, and I wonder if any of them are thinking, “TL;DR.” (“Too long; didn’t read” for those unfamiliar with social media acronyms.) But I love to write emails, for it is that mode of contact that lets me express myself the most eloquently.

No internet also means no YouTube. I know that YouTube is the video sharing platform of our grandparents and that I “should” be using TikTok, but YouTube contains many wonderful music mixes which I love to put on when I do household chores on the weekends. Not to mention that YouTube also has many of my beloved commercials from the past, like the 2003 Miller Beer ad where the people are falling like dominoes.

And, of course, no internet means no getting information. I needed a certain phone number last Friday that I could only obtain from the company’s website. Needless to say that I couldn’t get the phone number. Sigh.

So who was the culprit who stole our internet service?

At first the phone agent at our cable company thought it was the modem that had died, but we reached out to a tech-savvy friend of ours who came over, ran a diagnostic, and said it was the router that was dead. The last three days included two trips to the electronics store, three long calls with our cable company, and two calls to product manufacturers.

But…lo and behold, we have internet service again. Hooray!

What is the longest you have been without internet service? What did you do to get by during that time?