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Coffee and connectivity. Seems that is the perfect combination to solve woes caused by a massive Rogers network outage on Friday.
Compound that with thousands of Guelph residents losing power Friday morning, and many were looking for alternate workspace options, including those who are working from home.
Coffee shops like Planet Bean in Downtown Guelph turned into makeshift offices.
"We've been a lot more busy than usual," said Marcus, working behind the counter. "Most people just coming in, asking for a coffee and sitting down doing their work for most of the day. A lot of WiFi too, people need WiFi."
Looking around the room, many patrons had a laptop on the table, a pen and paper on one side and a coffee on the other, some listening in on meetings and such with headphones on.
Software engineer Travis briefly had internet Friday, just enough to receive a deluge of messages from his workplace that things weren't working.
He was making due with the temporary setup.
"I've had worse," he said. "Louder ones, busier ones so it's not the end of the world. I've had co-working spaces before so (this is the) same thing to me, (and) I got coffee and food this time."
Beside him was Jennifer, a nurse who deals with case management from home.
"I can't use public WiFi because of privacy issues, and I can't hotspot off of my Bell phone from where I'm staying, so I had to come to a coffee shop and hotspot," she said.
And how are things going?
"It's a little bit stressful," Jennifer said with a laugh. "But patient care has to continue, so what can you do."
Jeff, who works at Oracle, was another that had to make due. But the concept of working out of a coffee shop wasn't foreign to him.
"I do periodically come to the coffee shop to work anyway," he said. "But I had to go to about three of them to find internet that wasn't powered by Rogers,"
But even free available WiFi isn't enough support for some to have full access required to do their jobs.
Zach, a consultant who was sitting with Jeff, pointed out Jeff was also hampered by what could be called a double-edged sword: dual authentication.
"Even though he has WiFi from the coffee shop, he actually still can't work because he can't log into some of his accounts without getting (a) text (with) the little code," he said. "Even with the WiFi at the coffee shop, still there's challenges."
Phillip, a software developer, had no hydro or internet to work with, and had to find a radio to find out what was going on.
"Our office had to be closed as a result of it, and now we're on our own," he said. "The people without internet, some people are having to go to neighbours' houses and borrow internet just to tell us they can't come into work. We're suffering here."
"A little bit of networkmageddon but we'll get through it."
