I went off the grid last night, and I didn't like it one bit.

One after another, all the devices attached to my Time Warner Cable Roadrunner modem started failing, and suddenly I was left unable to talk to anyone -- or be talked to, for that matter.

As I've griped about numerous times, I have virtually no AT&T cell service in my home, but my microcell usually solves that, except when it goes down. My VOIP Vonage service is a suitable backup, but again, without broadband access, it's useless. And I couldn't get either of my two wireless routers to work for more than a few minutes at a time last night, either. All the hard and soft resets in the world didn't fix the problems.

Little did I know at the time that their rep on Twitter would ultimately offer me a fix.

(Full disclosure: Time Warner is an advertiser and partner of OnMilwaukee.com, though I've been a subscriber of cable for longer than I've owned OnMilwaukee.com.)

Anyway, except for a few corners in my house where my iPhone actually worked, I was cut off last night. Going off the grid isn't fun. Even when you're not looking to call, text, tweet or e-mail, is frustrating when you don't even have the option.

Not surprisingly, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

I know a thing or two about networking, so this morning I retraced my steps and realized that the problem must exist in the cable modem, itself, since none of the attached devices are working properly. Once I got back on the grid at work, I used Time Warner's live chat to explain my problem with my six-year old cable modem. It seemed pretty straightforward -- hardware that's on all the time eventually dies -- and because us customers just rent these modems, a simple swap should do the trick. Right?

Wrong. Over the course of an 18-minute chat with "Thomas," he politely asked me if I had connected the modem directly to a computer. I said no, but that the modem had worked fine in its current configuration for a long time. I asked if I could return the modem to the store.

Robert said, "We do not swap out modems. The only way to get a new modem is through a technician who is performing a service call."

I told Thomas that I really couldn't wait for allocate a chunk of a few hours during the workday to be present while a technician tells me the modem is fried.

He said that's the only way, and "if the technician determines that one of the routers is the cause of the problem, there would be a charge for the service call, $30.00."

Obviously, this conversation wasn't going anywhere, and I was running late for a meeting. Afterwards, I tweeted about my experience, and I received an unsolicited tweet from @TWCableBryanP, who simply asked: "My apologies for the poor experience. How may I help?"

Mere minutes later, and in 140 character bursts, I had explained my problem, and Brian confirmed that I could simply swap out my modem at a store. Problem solved. It was easy, polite and efficient.

This was the first time I used Twitter to solve a customer service issue, and it worked perfectly.

Many kudos for Time Warner for using social media to cut through the clutter and to find service people online who "get it." It was an incredibly refreshing experience that almost completely pacified my growing frustration with the inflexible "Thomas" this morning.

More companies should follow Time Warner's lead on this one.

This morning, I felt like I was being a little ignored by the giant, faceless cable company. This afternoon, I felt like they really cared about keeping my business.