The Internet was broken.

In this post: I hate AT&T.

Life at Howdygram headquarters began on a sour note this morning for the following reasons: 1) I woke up with heart palpatations; 2) the Internet was broken; and 3) isn’t that enough?

Item one, which eventually corrected itself, most likely resulted from a weird dream about running for a city bus in heavy snow. Item two kept me hanging on the phone for almost 80 minutes with a string of barely-helpful AT&T technicians reading from prepared scripts. Side note: AT&T has the most atrocious on-hold music I’ve ever heard. Sam remarked, “They’re even offending me with that crap!”

We were unable to access most websites this morning for about four hours. For instance, I could track a package with UPS and shop on Amazon, but FedEx and Wal-Mart wouldn’t load. Neither would Weather.com, Wells Fargo, the Internet Movie Database or the Dallas Morning News. We’d see is a little spinning circle and the word “Connecting” in the status bar until everything just timed out. My experience with AT&T, of course, will come as no surprise. After a number of insulting questions — “Is your computer plugged in?” “Do you know what a browser is?” — and rebooting our gateway modem at least three times, they finally agreed to send over a repair dude today by 4 p.m. However, while Sam was out getting a haircut this morning and I was partially unconscious on the chaise in the family room, our Internet service sprang back to life and has been working well ever since. Half an hour ago I used AT&T’s live chat feature, which required another 20-minute wait for an agent, to cancel the repair dude.

Ah, but there’s more! About five minutes later I receive the following robocall: “This is an important message from AT&T U-Verse. Your Internet service disruption today was due to a system-wide outage in your neighborhood. This is now repaired. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”

I WASTED MY ENTIRE MORNING FOR NOTHING. Holy crap, nobody knew there was an outage when I called at 9 a.m.? Seriously?

I need braunschweiger.