good morning everyone this is tony from her homestead skills and this is the day after our
internet blackout and yes we are live again we do have service
and fortunately for canada rogers is not the only service provider but they are one of the
main large ones they're one of the ones that have the infrastructure in place that some of the other
providers do use i think it's mainly bell and rogers in this part of the woods
out west it might be different they might have another large provider but like bell west i don't
know i don't know who's out there but rogers is one of the main providers and i was not aware
that they looked after the um atms nationwide interesting thing to have learned from this
blackout that we had um i wonder if that will change in the future
so um the internet does go down it's uh i'm not suggesting that it doesn't but unfortunately
when it goes down for 15 hours and more it does have repercussions and especially for those who
bundle all their services with one provider something i don't recommend and i think a lot
of people have learned that if they have bundled in the past that it probably is not wise to keep
doing so in the future at least if you unbundle you have some service through a different provider
so our telephones are on a different service than the internet unfortunately where i live the only
internet service provider available is rogers and actually i may be wrong there we might have
bell fiber available right now we'll have to look into that one and see if that is available anyway
we're up and running we are we have suffered no serious consequences although
i'm sure that some people have unfortunately when that service went down we also lost
some people lost telephone service i did not on my telephone is not with
um rogers but those that had telephone with rogers were down
were unable to send or receive telephone calls and that could be quite the issue there are no
freestanding telephone machines that you can go to now and put your quarter in and
make a call anymore those don't exist they've all been removed
interesting so all you can do is borrow somebody else's cell phone or
hopefully you don't need to make that call other critical services that were down were
9-1-1 calls i think were not answered so hopefully there have not been too many serious repercussions
on that one we'll have to wait and see i haven't heard anything just yet the other service that
was critically affected were debit transactions apparently no debit transactions went through
yesterday so that is an issue for a lot of people i'm not a big fan of debit transactions i do them
but i prefer to do credit card transactions and pay for it at the end of the month
but people who like to use debit were definitely affected i understand that a number of people
ended up leaving grocery carts full when they heard that only
cash or credit cards were accepted so they rather than
you know they had intended to use debit to pay for their purchases just left their carts and
walked out so a lot of disruptions and i'm sure today is going to be a big cleanup day
so what has that taught us well the one thing that i'm personally aware of and and i always have been
is or two things i guess mainly always have a little bit of cash on hand or enough supplies
to last you days or weeks there was a time where i'd only put a small amount of gas in my car
today when i go to fill up i fill up so i have a tank full and
i should be able to get to wherever i need to go
should there be an issue and gas is another thing that people couldn't buy
in certain cases if they were paying debit and besides having a little bit of cash on hand
perhaps having enough groceries that can last a few days a few weeks a few months
a few years depending on your thinking and your understanding of where the world is going today
i think everyone knows that i'm a firm believer in preparing for the worst hoping for the best
and i guess one of the other things i've learned through this is that yeah you prep some meals that
are ready to eat meals so what if the grid goes down what if you can't cook what if you can't
you don't have access to water you don't have access to electricity to cook or whatever it is
whether it's gas electricity whatever means you have to cook okay you can't cover off
every eventuality but you can have some ready-to-eat meals that you can just open up a can
and if you have to find a way to heat it or just eat it cold it's still ready to eat and you can
you won't starve and so things like stews and soups are a good thing to have on hand beans
pretty easy to mix up cold bean salad i mean you just open a few jars mix up those beans together
add a little bit of dressing and you have a good hearty bean salad that's ready to eat that will
alleviate your hunger for a while so those things are never a bad thing to have on
hand okay we know that there's going to be shortages we've all been informed by
the world that there are going to be food shortages and people are starting to catch
on but a lot of people think it's still not going to affect them uh you're a meat-eater
well i eat vegetables and i'm going to be just fine well that's not necessarily the case
yeah we know there's going to be beef shortages and chicken shortages and dairy shortages and
egg shortages and cheese shortages probably but what makes you think that there aren't
going to be vegetable shortages crops are failing as well oh and of course
bread and pastas are going to be short of flour because of what happened in the ukraine
and some people have stated that all of this was planned it's a test run
me i'm not so sure i always try to give people the benefit of the doubt and never attribute to malice
that which can be explained by stupidity and in my mind i don't think that somebody like a
company like rogers is definitely going to do this intentionally when it's going to hurt their bottom
line for sure they're going to lose customers over this there's no doubt about it and that their
stock prices are going to fall if they haven't already so
i don't really think that this was a planned venture but what do i know
i'm not in on the loop we're also already seeing price increases for your pet food and i have heard
that a lot of people are dropping off their pets because they can no longer afford to feed them
we could also face shortages of toilet paper and paper towels and all kinds of paper goods again
and what's causing all of this well you can't shut countries down for two years without it seriously
affecting the ebb and flow of goods and services a lot of people that work in particular industries
have left those industries and will never go back okay the bottom line i think is not so much that
you won't be able to get food i think that we in north america will still be able to get food but
i believe that the price will be skyrocketing the cost of everything will be skyrocketing and have i
learned anything from this internet situation dan well of course i have but it didn't affect me that
badly i think communications was the big thing i had no in i had no need to go and buy anything
uh and if i did i still had a little bit of cash on me and i could have bought a few grocery items
had i needed them so no issue there okay so rogers has yet to provide any information on what caused
their shutdown and the failure of their systems for that length of period yesterday and this puts
me in mind of a conversation i had with i guess what i would consider an old timer he was my
mother's generation not mine and he was bemoaning the fact that he did not understand technology
and that the world was moving away from him in the world that he knew and he was one of these
types that had old knowledge planting by the phases of the moon and that sort of
mentality that i still don't understand planting by the phases of the moon but my mother and
both he and my mother did understand that thought and that concept and other things that he knew
and you know how to how to plant a garden how to look after animals how to make cold cuts how to
make sausages and prosciutto and all those things he understood very well and
he knew how to prep for bad times okay so well i sat him down and i said
i tried to make him understand that yes the skills that he had were invaluable
whereas being able to sit at a keyboard and
learn how to use a computer and communicate through a computer and do whatever it is
that we do with computers whether it's accounting whether you know all those
neat programs that we have that we can now do on computers and obviously the communication value
it's not that he couldn't communicate it's just he had different means of communicating
so the skill set that he had was being lost and was invaluable
and i explained to him that should there be a failure in technology
should these systems go down and they are extremely vulnerable his skills are going to
be a whole lot more valuable than the skills of the youth that know how to use computers
i don't know if he quite got what i was trying to tell him but
you know with situations like this
and as i get older i'm beginning to understand even more fully how much the skills that he had
that you know i know a few of but wish i knew more and that we're losing are much more valuable than
but i'm a firm believer in both i don't think learning how to use a computer is a bad thing
but i also know that being able to fall back on old-time skills is extremely valuable as well
okay anyway this is tony from her homestead skills and we will catch you on the next one bye for now