Accustomed to broadband

From time to time my office internet connection stops working.  It appears that the link is available, but I'm not able to get to the internet.  If I ping the routers they respond quickly.  It appears that the DNS (domain name system) server is "hosed" again. It seems this largely occurs only when it is 1) very early in the morning and 2) I have quite a number of things to accomplish before a meeting.

When I call the service provider, Comcast, I usually end up going through a rather complex voice menu system and eventually end up speaking with a very polite service agent. I'll explain the tests I've done and the results I've seen. In spite of that, they'll run me through the same tests and get the same results I reported at the beginning of the call. It is clear to me that they must follow some script regardless of the customer's situation.

Only after the painful examination of the customer's computing environment, rebooting the modem while waving a bag of chicken bones over the system and making the customer chant "open cyapoom" do they come to the same conclusion I offered at the beginning of the call -- the DNS server is confused.

When the process comes to this point, the polite service agent tells me that the problem will be reported to the service department and they quickly close the call by saying "Have a nice day." I'm left without internet connectivity, no clear time when it will return and facing a great deal of work that was scheduled for this exact time slot.

Although very slow by today's standards, I turn to an old dial-up internet account that I maintain just for such occasions. It's amazing how previously snappy websites immediately become nearly unusable.  I guess that I've become accustomed to broadband and face a terrible set of withdrawal symptoms when it isn't available.