If you’re a website administrator or server tech at your place of work, you probably have a backup plan for if/when the Internet goes down. The complexity and intricacy of your backup plan probably depends on how important the Internet is for you.

As most of you probably already know, I’m the web director at the Badger Herald, which is a newspaper company that publishes all of its content on the Internet as well as in paper form. So, the Internet is pretty important to us, especially because we use the Internet to send all of our pages to the printer every night.

Charter Business Internet decided that today would be a great day to completely fail for all of Madison. I got a handful of texts and a phone call from my co-workers earlier today telling me that the Internet wasn’t working. Although it was a slight annoyance, it wasn’t a huge deal because I had plans for when this would happen, and I was prepared. I called Charter Business and they told me that the Internet in my entire area was down. I asked for an expected repair time, and all they could offer me was “as soon as possible.” I told the customer service representative that we were a newspaper company that relies heavily on the Internet and asked him what he proposes that I do; he said “there is nothing that you are able to do right now.”

I called my co-worker back and told her that Charter was down in our entire region. I suggested that she try and connect to the free unsecured wireless hotspot broadcasted by the business next door to ours; apparently she had already tried that and their Internet is down too because apparently they also use Charter.

So I hopped on the next bus and headed over to the office; while waiting for the bus, I tweeted “Damn you Charter Business Internet.”

After I got to the office, I executed my second backup plan, which is to tether Internet from someone’s phone who had an unlimited data plan. We found a handful of people, and I had a general idea of how to tether, but I’ve never actually tried it and didn’t realize how complicated it was.

Apparently for iPhones, you have to pay your service provider extra money; on top of that, service pro­viders for iPhones don’t offer unlimited data plans yet so you might end up paying overage charges. For Blackberries, you have to download a massive beast of a piece of software from their website to install onto your computer to be able to activate tethering on the phone. For other Android phones (which my deputy had, who also stopped by the office to help), you have to either pay for a third-party app, or follow your carrier’s instructions, pay extra, then have it not work anyway.

While attempting to get something working, I received a tweet from an unexpected person.

As you probably know by now, I’m used to people combing the Internet and figuring out random tidbits of personal information about me. The place where I live isn’t really personal either – I have it posted in a lot of random places. But, I still find it strange that a customer service representative from an Internet provider had the time and motivation to research me because of a random tweet I sent out and make a frail attempt to quell my anger so my 1,000+ followers don’t all think that Charter is horrible.

Which it’s not.

It usually doesn’t fail a lot, but when it does, it fails well, it fails hard, and it fails completely.

Meanwhile, we managed to find a stray Internet connection floating around from a different service provider so we could download the monster Blackberry software so we could install it on someone’s computer and tether Internet from someone’s Blackberry. After about an hour or so, I finally managed to download the entire file. Then I realized my laptop didn’t have Bluetooth so I couldn’t connect to the Blackberry, so I had to transfer the file onto a network drive (which took about 15 minutes) then had to redownload it from a laptop with Bluetooth (which took another 15 minutes or so).

By the time we were ready to install the software…

The Internet came back on.

So here’s my message to Charter: if you’re going to fail at giving Internet for a few hours and make me leave my apartment, go to work, try 18 different things before settling at the best method, wait an hour for a huge file to download, and wait another half hour for the file to transfer to the proper laptop, at least stay out for 3 more minutes so I can feel the glory of solving the problem.

Rather than coming back literally seconds before I was going to have a great success.