"Is it the outlook?"

At a little after 8 this morning, my Outlook e-mail stopped working.  I could send messages but couldn't receive.  After the morning meeting, I contacted the help desk.  After previous experiences with help desks, I was glad Dow has an option of chatting online - basically instant messenger.  I opted for that instead of trying to understand them over the phone.  I explain the situation and get a response of "Is it the outlook?".  I simply reply yes.  I am then asked "Did you open the outlook?".  *Obviously I did because I'm having problems receiving messages* I replied "yes, and I restarted it and it still doesn't work".  "Ok. I will be with you in a minute"  This person came to the solution that I should restart my computer and he/she would contact me when it was restarted.  This is at around 9:20.  I restart my computer and for about 10 minutes I am afraid to open outlook because I was not instructed to do so.  Well at 9:40 I decide that I should try to open it.  Once it opens and tries to receive a message, I get an application error so I open the chat again and talk to someone else.  At around 10:30 I finally get the solution that it is a "global problem and there is nothing you can do about it.  the server is down and will be fixed ASAP".  So, I spend the entire day at work without e-mail.  It was actually a little frustrating because all of my projects are at the point where I am waiting for responses from other people so I couldn't do any work.  The odd part about it was the down server was a Midland server (about 2 hours away) and I think I may have been one of the only ones in Harbor Beach (if not the only one) who was having the e-mail problem, but some of my friends in Midland were the only one's in their department who did have access to e-mail.  Oh technology!  I can't imagine how the actually full time workers felt about the all day outage.  Hopefully it will be resolved by the time I get to work tomorrow and maybe people will have responded so I have something to do.