It’s astonishing how traumatic a couple of hours without the internet can be, especially when it’s due to an unpaid bill, not just an outage.
(Very easy to make mistakes when you can’t actually read your bills. It wasn’t clear if we mislaid this one or it got lost in the mail. I got my aprtmanet agent to ask to have a new one sent and NOT to have service turned off in the meantime, but guess what. And of course they turned off the internet and left the cable TV on. As if I wanted that!)
However, all is fixed now and they even let me pay by credit card over the phone (rare here) and turned the service back on instantly (which would probably be unlikely in the US and impossible in the Netherlands.
I think being an expat must have been far more isolating pre-Internet.