Broadbandly speaking

I wanted to impress a new client. Customarily, there are two ways to do this: first, write well enough or a little better. Second, deliver on time. If the gods like you, the amount of time you'd like to spend writing and the deadline are balanced. Often, that's as good as the weather can get for a copywriter.

The brief was simple and sketchy enough that I could assume a few truths. I didn't exactly have free reign over the correct form the draft was to have taken, but I had a previous example to follow, or 'cheat from,' as it were. In short, what was required was to tidy up, sharpen up, and 'sales' up the 22-page manuscript. I had more or less two days to do it.

I really knocked this piece of work on the head. I did it without stress. I wrote at home on the couch in shorts and neglected my personal hygiene well into the early evening. I turned a downbeat brochure into a sales piece that was really going to move those apartments in Eastern Europe. And I did it without exclamation marks! A triumph all round.

What's more, I was satisfied with the copy fully 45 minutes before the deadline. This gave me time to read it through two more times and get it really, really tight. I even read it aloud the second time and tweaked anywhere I stumbled. I actually looked forward to sending the delivery email.

Then my broadband blew up. I over-dramatise: It simply stopped working. No warning, no fanfare, no on-screen gremlin, no virus. Like the sun, it simply and uneventfully went down, as though that was exactly what it was supposed to do at the end of the day.

I rang my client to apologise for what was surely to be a late delivery. He was understanding and had heard news that my service provider's servers were down most of the afternoon across most of the UK. You could almost hear 'the sound of chests being beaten up and down the country,' as he skillfully put it.

Still, I knew he wanted it on time. Every client does. I weighed my options, took a shower at long last, scooped up my laptop and headed down the road to the German pub. If there was a place in longest Lambeth guaranteed to have a working wi-fi connection, it would be an establishment run by Teutons.

I flipped open the computer, ordered a 'milchkaffee' and zapped the document through the air and down the phone line in seconds. Gott sei dank.

I went to bed that night certain that not even my crap ISP could screw me two days in a row. I clearly didn't give them enough credit.

What struck me most was the thoroughness with which the ongoing outage ruined my entire attitude towards life - not just modern life - for the next seven hours. I sat crippled on the couch for the first two hours, my brain scrambling to devise a plan that would accommodate all I wanted to achieve that morning and afternoon. Every timeline I concocted became perforated, a gap developing somewhere along the way that only a working attachment to the internet could fill.

Time was flying, and I was paralysed and helpless because I couldn't check my bloody email for edit requests or new work queries. (And before you ask, 'Why not just pick up the telephone?', let me say that you've missed the point if you so much as consider such an absurd solution.)

My first attempt to leave the house at 11a.m. ended in disappointment: the Germans wouldn't up tools until noon, so I came back home and sat on the couch some more. The cleaning lady was coming at 13:00. My carry bag with everything in it was just too heavy to lug around town all day. I was already sweating from stress. My head couldn't sort anything out. Eventually I bit down, packed my gym kit and laptop and made myself lug it all from the flat.

I took the 59 bus to Southbank Centre. Le Pain Quotidien, the French (or is it Belgian?) sarnie chain would have wi-fi, I was certain. And I was right, except that their service provider, I discovered after ordering a £7 sandwich, was also my service provider. I slowly shut the laptop, moped through my ham and sourdough and skulked next door to County Hall.

My gym is in a five-star hotel in County Hall. Surely a posh bloody hotel on the South Shitting Bank could accommodate my perceived need for wi-fi. They did have a wi-fi lounge, but it was hired out for a private business function. I tried connecting from the corridor just outside the room, cradling my laptop in my arms, but no luck. Pissed off, I went to the gym for a 30 minute aerobic grind, which made me feel marginally better.

I still hadn't connected to the internet.

I walked along the Thames and back to my neighbourhood. It was just after 3:00 p.m. A bowl of 'suppe' and a diet Coke later, the Germans had saved me once more. But it was a hollow victory: no edits, no work offers, no nothing except the usual shit Facebook wall posts and a dozen or so pieces of spam from my friends at the finer penis pill manufacturers of, I assume, greater Europe.

Then my battery died.

I arrived home five minutes later, plugged charger into laptop, turned on the broadband and everything was, as if by evil, ironic magic, back to normal. The service seemed to work even better than it had before the blackout. But that's what doing without will get you.

I poked Molly, Kevin, Adam and Matt on Facebook, and then I watched the Simpsons.