One more thing I've been through

Ok, I have seen quite a bit in my 30 years of life. Not much really surprises me nor upsets me nowadays. Hurricanes? Hah! Winter in the Azores is like a 3 month hurricane. We get waves up to 20 feet in the winterime. Earthquakes? Please! I've lived through an earthquake that destroyed our house back on New Year's Day 1980 (which subsequently left my folks to move us back to the states and me to spend my childhood in the New England area.). Power outages? Uhm, I did tell you that I live in the Azores right? Power outages are all too common. Water shortages? Been there already. When we moved here in 1991, we had water once every 3 days and for 30 minutes in the morning. It was quite a sight to see my family go down to my aunt's house to shower because she had running water. Yes, I've been through alot and seen alot. But I've NEVER in my entire life been through what I and 60,000 other people on 3 islands had to go through yesterday. I mean this was one for the record books. It all started at 2pm Azorean time (10am Eastern, 7am Pacific). I was programming one of the many sites we host at the company I work for and listening to WEEI online talk about the Bronson Arroyo for Wily Mo Pena deal when suddenly the radio goes dead, then all my messengers go dead, then I can't access any web page out there. The entire internet went dead. Ok, right there no biggie, been through that before. After all I do live on an island smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But I then tried to call my friend Mike about what was going on and, even though my cell phone had full signal, the call couldn't be made due to an error in the network. So now, I had no internet and no cell phone. Alright then, I pick up the land phone and decide to call him. Nope! Even though there was a dial tone when I dialed, there would be a message halfway through me dialing the number saying that there was a malfunction in the network. So, to recap, I had no internet, no cell phone and no landline. Every form of telecommunication was rendered useless.......FOR THE NEXT 12 HOURS!!! Now, just how severe was this? Well, aside from your everyday Joe not being able to Google a site up, but if you wanted to get some cash from your local ATM, you were S.O.L. If you wanted to buy some groceries and wanted to pay by credit card or debit card, no luck. If you wanted to Go to the bank to withdraw cash, sorry. For 12 hour, the island I live on (Terceira) and 2 neighboring islands (Graciosa and São Jorge) were without any form of telecommunications to the "outside world". And you can bet that estimated losses in revenue from this glitch could be well around a few million Euros. There were cases of people leaving full shopping carts right in the isle at the supermarkets because they had no cash on them and couldn't pay with credit card, debit card, and even check. Now, worse yet is that the company in charge of the telecom infraestructures here, Portugal Telecom, didn't say what the problem was the whole time. In fact, we only knew about it the next day on the afternoon news, and even then the regional director for P.T. only said it was a "software glitch" that caused it. That's all he said, nothing more, nothing less. And, the coup de gras in all of this is that I've yet to here one store owner, or one travel agent, or one person who lost cash yesterday due to the "glitch", mention a law suit or demanding retribution on the part of P.T. See, had this been in the states, this would NOT have gone unanswered. The telephone company would be flooded with so much litigation that they would be signing checks until they suffered Carpal Tunnel sydrome. But alas, here in the Azores, where things run SLOW, people would just prefer not to act because they "don't want to get the importanr guys angry". Well, on my part, from me to the guys at Portugal Telecom, who screwed me out of 12 hours of net. I salute you!