24 hrs of non-internet bewilderness

Due to heavy rains (37 inches) in mumbai in the past 24 hrs, most of the mumbai based ISPs were unable to provide internet services yesterday.
Sitting in office for the whole day without internet can be frustating to a software engineer. It is days like this when you get to know how much connectivity and networking the internet has bought in our lives. Bill Payments, Bank transactions, giving and taking tech/non-tech consultancy to friends, and college style timepass in case one is getting bored :-).

I have not yet been able to write a post on the merits/de-merits of messenger and my take on it getting banned in software companies, but just to think how many phone calls it saves me everyday and how it non-intrusively works as a phone, voice mail, sms service alongwith capabilities of virtual meetings, discussions ... non-intrusive being the keyword, it certainly brings lots of buisness value to a software company.
Just to counter the point that messenger decreases employee productivity, think how much productivity is lost when you are in a meeting and the phone rings every minute. Cause phones are intrusive, there is no way out but to pick them even if they are low priority.
Of course there are downsides, but that is analogous to the dialogue by Om Puri in Maachis "maachis ki tili, khana bhi paka sakti hai aur ghar bhi jala sakti hai"

internet in its full form is a necessity in today's world and some company cannot simply take it away from an employee on security/bandwidth or "employee productivity" concerns.