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Yesterday was an incredibly stressful day for me. I am usually pretty unstressed and have great coping mechanisms for dealing with stress. I am able to easily recognise it and usually am able to manage it well. Stress for me is usually around deadline completion for clients. However yesterday I wanted to rip off the heads of _insert large animal here_ and throw things and scream like a 14 year old teenage girl having a tantrum.

Why?

Our internet stopped working early in the morning.

OK – so why is that bad, and why did it stop working? Well when you build a business that is based on having the internet running as much as it is based on the power running, not having either is very stressful. Made more so when you can do nothing about it. Now in the case of the internet, we have a very good relationship with our supplier, the best ISP in Australia Internode. We have a silver level business grade account with a dedicated service line, short phone queues (typically under a minute to be answered) and very good techs who provide great assistance. However yesterday they could tell me nothing about why the internet suddenly stopped connecting! We knew that the router was working – it was brand new and we switched between it and another one just to check, we eliminated potential network issues here by isolating the network and connecting directly, and they had no known reasons from their end for it not to be working, yet while the modem would handshake and attempt to authenticate it could not get authentication to occur.

The strange thing was we had a sort of kind of access occasionally. Mail dribbled in periodically as for brief moments we had connection, and when pinging out we could sometimes get 1 or 2 ping requests to work, however 75% to 100% packet loss is unacceptable. More worrying was that remote staff who access our servers here needed access and they couldn't get it.

I could feel my gut getting more and more churned up. It was like someone was twisting a rubber band around my insides and shortening my breath and my stomach. I even got in the car and drove up to the local exchange in case there were technicians working there.

I did have my mobile access so i was connected using my laptop – but i couldn’t do much as I couldn’t access my servers here. I just complained on face book a lot! Sorry about that!

In the end I decided to stop worrying and go and do something else. I was all set to go for a bike ride after I rang my sister to wish her happy birthday when i received a incoming call while I was talking to her. I hung up on her to take the call from Internode and was told that it was fixed. My modem had authenticated. After a bit more fiddling and swapping out the ADSL filter we had a solid connection again. A short time later, one of my staff pointed me to this news article titled Telstra brings regional exchanges up to speed. Apparently it was our exchanges turn today. However no one was informed. they effectively shut down at least part of the exchange with no consideration to users and no advice to the ISP’s who bear the brunt of the consumers wrath.

I was so relieved that it was on that I went and played basketball for an hour before going to football training. When I got home I had two staff meetings online and then took the rest of the night off!

Thanks goodness yesterday is over. Today’s stress is now related to the fact that I am a day behind. It is manageable and I am not worried – it is raining and all is good in my world!

(PS Kitty did not get her head ripped off in the photo.)