‘It’s amazing how much we do online now’

SALISBURY — Businesses, town government offices and just plain folks all scrambled to find ways to make do without the worldwide web when a Comcast failure last Tuesday caused the loss of Internet and Comcast telephone service in Salisbury, Sharon, Falls Village, North Canaan and Norfolk from roughly 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Cellphone service was unaffected, and that was ultimately what David Maffucci of Lake-ville’s Visionary Computer had to resort to.“I was standing in the back of my office where I can get a signal, trying to answer email with my phone,” he said.He called the day “a disaster.”By Friday, he said he had caught up.“It was a little bit of a zoo,” he said. “It’s amazing how much we do online now.”Dan Bolognani, in the sales and marketing department at the Interlaken Inn in Lake-ville, was glad the outage didn’t come during a busy summer weekend.The Interlaken’s website updates inventory every half hour, he said, and the danger was of visitors overbooking the available rooms.The inn wasn’t completely cut off, though — they have regular AT&T phone lines and Comcast for outgoing calls.Still, “it was like sitting in the dark.”The Interlaken also had to break out the credit card slips — the ones with the carbons — and the old-fashioned pressure imprinter.It could have been a lot worse, Bolognani said. “It was more of an inconvenience — and a little bit of a fright.”Echoing Maffucci, he added, “In this day and age we do so much on the computer.”At Town Hall, the selectmen’s secretary, Emily Egan, said it was awkward without email but the phones were working — and people were calling, wondering about the Internet.Jean Bell in the town clerk’s office said the Internet outage was inconvenient — agendas and minutes of meetings couldn’t be received or posted — but they managed.