My internet abruptly went down a couple of weeks ago. I was able to call my ISP and talk to an actual human being (!) at 1:00 in the morning and they sent someone out the very next day to replace our dead modem. Even so, not having access to the web from anything but my excruciatingly slow (and tiny screened) "smart phone" for even a few hours was disruptive as hell. Funny how accustomed we've all gotten to instant internet access over the past ten years or so.
I got another taste of this tonight when I realized (to my horror) that it was a family member's birthday, and I had less than two hours to get a present sent off to her. Thankfully, there's the handy, dandy standby for idiots like me (who are terrible at remembering important dates and hate going shopping)--the Amazon gift card.
But no. Not tonight. For some mysterious reason, the Amazon site is not accessible. It was coming up, but every attempt to click on any link (including the one for gift cards) on the site caused a page loading error to come up. Oh the outrage!
Not so many years ago, it just wouldn't have occurred to me that I could have 24-7 access to retail awesomeness (though there was a brief flirtation with 24 hour grocery stores in the 80s, as I recall. Those went away after a while. Guess they weren't profitable). Now, being denied it makes me decidedly peevish. The Amazon gift card can be e-mailed to the recipient, and so it pulls the fat out of the fire for last minute "oh crap!" gift purchasers like me.
My mother is probably laughing at me, or will be when she reads this. She tried to teach me to be better at planning ahead.
No idea what's wrong with the Amazon site. Googling the issue gives me a lot of information about another outage that occurred on Jan 31, but not much about what's going on right now. There's one site where people are making facebook posts about it, and that's it.
Maybe it should be comforting that the world's not quite as instantaneous as it sometimes seems.
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