Our phone service has been off at home since Sunday and AT&T said they might not get around to fixing it until Friday. I’d say that that qualifies as a FAIL.

On the other hand, I see an awful lot of whining online about things that the poster considers a FAIL that doesn’t seem to be that bad at all.

Last night I got involved with someone discussing something they were just incensed about. Yes – I know better – I just couldn’t help myself. I’ll consider that a “FAIL” on my part.

This person was upset that local television station had moved their coverage of the US Open from channel 19 to channel 43. “FAIL” he posted.

Really? Both channels are free broadcast channels owned by the same company. If you can get one channel you can get the other. So I tweeted back to the complainer and asked how it was a FAIL.

He explained to me that this was a big event with a world-wide audience and millions and millions of dollars involved. He was absolutely right. Though this might not matter to our local television stations. They looked at their Monday night line up and decided which channel would be better served by running their regular programs and which would accommodate the US Open.

And so I FAILed again. I asked who lost out? The audience? No. They could watch on either channel. Advertisers? No.

He explained that he had lost out. He turned on the channel he thought it was on and when it wasn’t on he assumed they were in a rain delay so he missed much of the match.

I came to my senses and stopped replying.

But what happened to our resourcefulness? The US Open isn’t on the channel we thought it would be on. Don’t we flip around a bit? Don’t we check the listings? Don’t we … oh never mind – we immediately tweet about the television station’s FAIL.

I wanted to tweet “Take a step back. Take a breath. The FAIL might be you.” But it never is.

Some people will blame this on social media. “We never did this before there was Facebook, My Space, and Twitter.”

Of course we did.

I had a friend in college who told me that the electric company was shutting off his electricity.

Really? The power company woke up one day and decided to mess with you? What a FAIL.

No. It turned out that he hadn’t paid his bill in months. But still…

So when our phone went out the other day we first checked that our bill had been paid. It had. Then we called the company for repair. The recording told us not to check back for a week as it could take that long. That’s probably a FAIL.