From the Editor’s Desk: Offline ⭐

Back in late June and early July, my wife was on a cruise in Europe with her college roommate, and I was in Pennsylvania using the extra time to plow through a thorough update of the Windows 11 Field Guide that's still ongoing. From a schedule perspective, we were about halfway through a two-month stay in the U.S. after having come back from Mexico City in mid-May, and we'd be returning there in mid-July. It was a busy time, with trips, doctor and other appointments, and a rush to catch up with the people and places we care about in PA. Plus, our normal day-to-day jobs. That never ends.

Anyway, I was working and didn't want any distractions, but my phone buzzed with a notification from Blink, the app for the camera mounted on the balcony of our apartment in Mexico City. Blink notifies me only rarely, and it's always for one of two reasons: It detected motion, usually because some bird decided the camera was a nice temporary perch, or because it had been disconnected from the network for 30 minutes and was still offline.

This time, it was offline, so I launched the Eero app to check in on the Wi-Fi network. Eero was offline as well, so this was either a power outage or an Internet problem. Power outages are unusual for our apartment in Mexico City, especially outages that last more than a second or two, but they can happen. Internet outages are even more unusual--our connection in Mexico is faster and more stable than what we have in PA--but we do have a strange problem, common in Mexico, that happens three or four times a year. Even though we're on an auto-pay system, the amount that auto-pays is sometimes less than a dollar (U.S.) off the correct amount. And our Internet provider, TotalPlay, just turns off the connection. That they can automate correctly.

I didn't know which issue we were experiencing, and there was no way for me to handle it myself if TotalPlay was at fault: Stephanie had set that up four years ago for reasons I can't remember, and she deals with these things. (Comically, you can walk down to a local OXXO convenience store and pay the remainder of whatever bill in cash there, and the connection will come right back; if you pay it electronically, it could be hours or even the next day.) I figured I'd give it a while, but when I woke up the next morning and saw that our connection was still down, I texted Stephanie. Given the connectivity issues with her on the cruise, I knew nothing would be resolved quickly.

And I was right on that count, at least. She contacted TotalPlay multiple times while she was away but had difficulty getting through to anyone. Finally, she got on a WhatsApp chat with someone there who told her something unexpected. TotalPlay hadn't shut us down because of the usual billing snafu. They had shut us down because of unusually high usage. They had never contacted us about this, not once, and they didn't explain what that even meant.

Confronted by this information, I blamed myself. We have...