SUNDRE – After being cut-off from their internet connection since late on Wednesday morning, staff at the Sundre Eyecare Clinic were relieved to come back into work Friday morning and find the business' service had been restored some time overnight.
“It was very nice to see that everything was up and we can actually do our job today,” said Angie Vanderzwan, a pre-tester who prepares patients for their eye exams with the optometrist.
Asked if everything was back to normal, Vanderzwan told the Albertan, “It seems like it is.”
With the connection finally restored, staff planned to catch up on a bit of a backlog, she said.
“Now we can actually finish stuff that we were doing yesterday,” referring to placing orders and of course checking emails that had been inaccessible since the internet went dark at approximately 11 a.m. on Oct. 2.
Many other businesses and residents were also impacted by the outage, with some finding themselves leaning on the Sundre Municipal Library to access the publicly available Wi-Fi network, which is made possible courtesy of the Super Net that is provided by the province.
“The Alberta government provides the Super Net and Parkland (Regional Library System) has access to it,” said Joy Willihnganz, library manager.
While it is not uncommon for library patrons to come in seeking to use the library’s internet on any given day, Willihnganz said on Oct. 4 that there were some who needed assistance as a direct result of the outage that people experienced.
“I would say between five to 10 people over the course of yesterday afternoon came in specifically to do printing or accessing our computers to print or things like that because printers at home on WiFi, of course, wouldn’t print,” she told the Albertan.
Some also needed access to the internet through the library’s Wi-Fi, while a handful of others came in to comment about the situation and were simply curious to know whether the library still had internet access, she said.
“Usually the ones that were asking were ones that needed service delivery,” she said.
The situation emphasized the importance of internet connectivity that people depend on just to function in modern society.
“We just didn’t realize how many people really were lost without the internet for day-to-day tasks,” she said.
It also served as an important reminder that a 21st century library provides patrons with so much more than access to a collection of books.
“It just kind of highlights that the library is there when people don’t necessarily think they’re going to need it,” she said.
“And it’s nice that the library was able to meet that need.”
