Let me walk you through a real life modern day horror story. It started with a simple goal: I just wanted to connect my laptop to the internet so I could do my job. That’s it. Nothing fancy. No criminal masterminding. No black hat hacking. Just boring old remote work like I do every weekday (and more weekends than I care to acknowledge).

Unfortunately, I live in the year of our broken tech overlords 2025, where “just connect to the internet” is apparently asking too much of the overpaid failure machines running our infrastructure.

Here’s what happened.

1. Sparklight: Masters of Silence

My internet provider, Sparklight, went down. No warning, no alert, not even a sad emoji to let me know they’d tripped over the metaphorical power cord. This, despite them constantly nagging me to sign up for notifications.
Spoiler: I did. It didn’t help. No notification EVER came.

I tried their live chat — no response.
I called — first six attempts were met with, and I quote, “technical difficulties.”

Finally, after mashing buttons and sacrificing what remained of my sanity, a recorded message acknowledged there was an outage in my area. No ETA. Just vibes.

2. Verizon: Loyal Customers Get Less

Fine. No problem. I’ve got a smartphone. I’ll use my mobile hotspot like a contemporary adult.

But surprise! Verizon — my carrier for over 25 years — has decided that despite my $70+ monthly bill, my long-term loyalty, my on-time payments, and my general not-being-a-criminal, I don’t get to use the hotspot feature.

You know, unless I pay even more.
For the privilege of using the data I already pay for.
On a plan they marketed as “unlimited.”
It's like buying a sandwich and getting charged extra for the bread.

I even tried using my Mom’s phone instead. Verizon redirected us to their website to set it up... A website that, of course, wouldn’t load.

Truly, this was the full customer experience.

3. My Backup Backup Plan? On Fire Too.

Out of desperation, I checked with my brother on the other side of town, thinking maybe I could hang out there for the day.
Guess what? His internet was also down. The entire town was down.

He’s limping along on his own hotspot, but it’s like drinking data through a coffee stirrer. Everyone else in his neighborhood is doing the same, and it’s basically dial-up in cosplay.

ARGH!

4. The Laptop of Shame

So I pivot. Could I maybe USB tether? No, because I don’t even own a USB cable anymore. Because I live in the future and everything is wireless — until it's not.

Even if I did have one, I’d need to install software to get it working. On my locked-down corporate laptop.

And that brings us to the final boss of this failure gauntlet:

5. My Employer: Where Trust Goes to Die

I’ve worked for the same company on and off since 1999. Longer than some of my coworkers have been alive. I’ve never once caused a security incident or been in trouble for any reason. I am, by all definitions, a good and reliable employee.

But my employer doesn’t trust me. Not even enough to let me:

• Install a safe, temporary workaround.
• Use a personal device to access work tools.
• Connect from anywhere outside the fortress of their surveillance bubble.

Oh, they offer an option:

“Just install this profile on your personal phone so we can monitor and wipe it whenever we like!”

Absolutely not.

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🚨 What This Really Means

This isn’t just a bad day. I mean, it WAS a bad day. But it's more than that. It’s a systemic failure across every layer of modern life:

• ISPs that can’t communicate.
• Carriers that punish or ignore loyalty.
• Employers that confuse control with security.
• Tech ecosystems that demand total obedience for basic functionality.

Everything is interconnected — and every part of the system is built to serve itself, not the person caught in the middle.

You’re allowed to pay. You’re allowed to obey. You’re not allowed to work around a failure. Because if you could? You’d stop needing them.

You'd stop paying them.

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🕹️ The Illusion of Control

We live in a world where your data, your devices, your access—none of it is really yours.
You’re just renting the right to use it under very specific conditions, most of which boil down to:

“Don’t try to do anything we didn’t explicitly think of, approve, or monetize.”

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❓ What’s Left?

Honestly? Mostly rage.
And the realization that competent, well-meaning people are constantly being throttled by the very systems they rely on.

It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. It's disenfranchising. And it’s not your fault.

So no, I’m not sorry for being angry. I’m tired of pretending this is normal.

If we don’t say it out loud, they’ll just keep calling it “customer-first” or “zero trust security” while gaslighting us into compliance.

The system isn't broken.
It’s working exactly as intended.
And it’s time to stop pretending that’s okay.

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Also... just fyi. I got paid for a day where I couldn't work. So maybe it's not all bad.