It's a story as old as the Internet.
You fire up your Web browser and all you get is some cryptic error message.
Try as you might, jiggling wires, pulling plugs and tossing keyboards, the Internet is down. No Web. No e-mail. For some, no life.
Then it's time to call the service provider.
Carol Sinclair, a Halifax actress and playwright, found herself in that position, and now, what started as a routine telephone standoff with an Internet provider, leaves her facing criminal charges.
"I was polite the first 20 times I talked to them," she told The Globe and Mail. "But each one gave me the same routine: 'Is the modem connected. Are the lights blipping?' And then each one would say, 'It should be working, it should be working. The problem must be with your computer.' "
Ms. Sinclair said they wouldn't send a repairman. She'd spent the previous weeks tending to ailing family members and was a little behind on her latest project, a stage adaptation of CBC broadcaster Linden Macintyre's memoir, Causeway.
"I was a little stressed," the 53-year-old said. "I had six days to do a month's work."
The actress said she called her provider, Aliant, one last time, disguising her voice to sound like a man and telling the company she needed her connection right away because she was a businessman.
"Lo and behold, they said someone would be over between 8 and 11 the next morning."
At around 12:30 p.m., Ms. Sinclair said, a "huge, strapping young man" arrived to fix the connection.
"I told him I wasn't going to be polite because of all the explaining I'd already had to do over the phone," Ms. Sinclair said.
"This was my living, my income on hold."
But the technician, 21-year-old David Scott, couldn't find anything wrong. He said the problem lay with Ms. Sinclair's computer.
That's where versions of the story diverge.
According to Halifax Police, Ms. Sinclair was enraged with Mr. Scott. "She told the technician, in a tirade, that he was not leaving until her Internet was working and she told him she was keeping him hostage," Constable Jeff Carr said.
"She implied that she had a gun, although he didn't see one."
The repairman told Ms. Sinclair he could fix her computer, but first had to retrieve a disc from his truck, according to the police version of events. Ms. Sinclair followed Mr. Scott downstairs, but he was able to run away and drive to the Aliant office.
Ms. Sinclair, on the other hand, said that when Mr. Scott couldn't find a problem with the connection, she asked him to call another technician.
When he told Ms. Sinclair that someone else was on his way, she recalled saying, "I don't want to hold you hostage, but would you mind hanging around until the other technician arrives so that the two of you can sort it out."
"All of a sudden, he says he can fix my connection after all," Ms. Sinclair said. "He just needs to get a disc from his van."
Ms. Sinclair followed Mr. Scott downstairs to the van. She held the front door to the complex so he could get back in. Instead, she said, she watched as Mr. Scott jumped in his van and sped off.
"I felt like I was in the surreal zone," she said. "I couldn't figure out what spooked this kid."
Frustrated that she'd blown yet another day wrangling with her Internet provider, she said, she went back upstairs to the condo and cracked a vodka cooler. "It was five hours earlier than I usually drink, but I was frankly a little frustrated."
She'd downed a third of her cooler when a knock came at the door. She opened it to see five police officers.
No firearms were found in the house.
"I'm a Buddhist," Ms. Sinclair said. "I'm a wimp. I'm a pacifist."
An Aliant spokesman said the company does not discuss issues that are before the courts.
Ms. Sinclair was arraigned in Halifax Provincial Court Friday and is now free on conditions including that she have no contact with Mr. Scott or any Aliant employee. She is due back in court Sept. 30.
With a report from The Canadian Press
