I know that shrug. I have my own small company and a few years ago I watched as the 3 incoming POTS lines went one by one from good to scratchy to dead, followed by our ISDN line going down.
I went outside and walked across the street where a contractor was using a Ditch Witch directional drill to install a new conduit for the phone company. I asked him if he might have just cut any cables. After a brief "oh shit" look, he responded "no".
He had cut one of those thousand or so pair plastic and copper phone company cables about the size of your arm. The phone company was on-site within an hour and worked all night, stringing a cable along the ground and splicing it around the break at the two manholes nearest the cut. Everything was back up the next morning. It was at least 2 months before they pulled the cut cable section out and got everything back underground.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: All the internet around here went out sometime in mid-morning Thursday. Cableone said they first hoped to have us back in service within 'a few hours', but by later in the day they were saying they 'hoped to have repairs finished by nightfall'. After stringing up lots of very bright lights across this very muddy farmer's field were the cut had occurred then they said 'we hope it will all be repaired sometime tonight' . At 9:55 PM, or about 12 hours after the fiber cut occurred near Parsons, KS _my_ service at least came back to life when the first four green LEDs on my cable modem illuminated. The lady in the office here in town over on Penn Street called me at about 10:30 PM to say 'we are notifying customers who called us throughout the day to say that service has been restored. If you do not mind, give it a try for me.' I told her I had tried it already; was working on the Digest and it all appeared to be working fine.A sort of odd event: Using my geo-locating tools and my javascripts, when I go to those places which identify my whereabouts, I am always correctly located in Independence, KS (although not on my exact spot on the map but within a couple blocks); but when I was using my TerraWorld modem backup line yesterday, the same pages and tools said I was in 'Ballwin, Missouri' (which is not that far away, about a hundred miles east and a bit south -- but still). I wish I knew how those geo-locating tools worked. PAT]