Ahoy there, folks. Don't think that just because I'm not doing Question of the Week anymore that you don't have to listen to me babble. I have plenty of babbling to do. Bwahahahahaha.
As you may have noticed, things went pretty haywire over the weekend. Now, I work a few weekend shifts, and one of them happens to be quite early in what I consider my day. (To explain: I am awake at very odd hours.) I don't have a fancy home office or anything, my computer is about four feet from my bed, so I usually wake up, pummel the alarm clock into submission, go back to sleep, pummel the alarm clock again nine minutes later (oh, the wonders of "snooze"), roll out of bed, and hit "enter" on all of the screens I use for work, which I've set up the night before with everything all ready so that my sleepy brain can cope.
This routine went very, very well on Sunday, until nothing worked. I believe my exact response was something along the lines of "gnuh?"
I tried the forums. "Gnuh?"
I tried the oceans again. "Blarg."
I tried the oceanmaster chat program. "Whuh-eek.
I was aware that some folks had been having trouble connecting for a couple of days due to some ISP iffiness, and really should have guessed it was related to that, but keep in mind I'd been awake perhaps fifteen minutes at this point, and I don't drink my caffeine in the mornings. (Cola for breakfast being a bit weird, even by my standards.) Naturally, then, I drew the obvious conclusion: my internet was down. I rebooted my computer, then went to yell at the modem. By the time my computer was back up, my internet actually WAS down, which fortunately only lasted about thirty seconds, because by this point I was wide awake and panicking a bit — there's not many people to cover a shift at that particular time of day if someone doesn't show up! Fortunately, it's also a time of day when you're all relatively peaceful except for the odd conniption, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility for my partner on that shift to keep an eye on my oceans as well as theirs, but nobody wants to be That Guy/That Gal.
When my internet came back after the longest thirty seconds in recorded history, there was a missive from Hera on my screen, to the effect of "it's not just you. Everything's gone. For everyone." Imagine my relief! My shift consisted of hitting the F5 button a lot until I remembered that I have a plugin for Firefox that I can set to refresh a tab for me. Someone saw puzzlepirates.com a couple of hours in, but it was later deemed to be a hallucination. It was quite a peaceful shift, but on the whole, I think I'd rather be dealing with the odd conniption fit. Much more entertaining, and less likely to lead to me waking up with keyboard-face. Not that I fell asleep. Honest.