I didn’t know I had an internet data problem.
Until Cox told me I had one.
A few days before the end of my June billing cycle, I received an automated email telling me I had reached 75% of my monthly data allowance.
That was unusual.
I had never come close enough to my limit to pay attention to it before.
So I logged into my account.
That’s when I discovered one day with 224 GB of usage—nearly half of what I had used during an entire previous month.
My first reaction was basically:
What in the world happened that day?
My second reaction was more uncomfortable:
How long has this been happening?
Because the 75% warning didn’t create the problem.
It simply made the problem visible.
And there’s an important difference.
For the next several weeks, Chad and I became increasingly familiar with Cox data reports.
We looked backward.
We compared months.
We compared days.
We looked at what I was doing on high-usage days versus low-usage days.
We looked at my Macs, my iPhone, Google Photos, an Amazon Fire Stick that apparently had a more active social life than I did, and eventually just about anything in my house capable of connecting to Wi-Fi.
And I kept thinking:
How did I not notice this sooner?
The answer is actually pretty simple.
I had no reason to look.
My internet worked.
My Zoom calls worked.
I taught my GoToWebinar classes.
My television streamed.
My bill arrived.
I paid it.
Everything appeared to be fine.
Until it wasn’t.
That’s what makes some problems so expensive.
They don’t announce themselves when they begin.
They accumulate quietly.
A good employee becomes a little less engaged.
A customer starts buying a little less.
A project slips by a few days.
Expenses creep upward.
A process that used to take 20 minutes now takes 35.
One person on the team starts picking up work that someone else isn’t doing.
Nothing is dramatic enough to warrant an intervention.
So we don’t intervene.
Then one day the turnover notice arrives.
The client leaves.
The budget is blown.
The deadline is missed.
Or Cox sends you an email saying:
You’ve used 75% of your data.
And suddenly what looks like a new problem isn’t new at all.
It’s simply the first time you noticed it.
That doesn’t mean leaders should monitor every metric every day.
I’ve now experienced what that looks like.
For a while, checking my Cox usage every morning became part of my routine.
Open the app.
Look at yesterday’s number.
Feel either relief or mild panic.
Send screenshot to Chad.
Repeat.
At one point I had fewer than 200 GB remaining with several days left in the billing cycle. I knew Cox would waive my first overage, but that wasn’t really the point.
I didn’t want to spend another $50 every month for unlimited data just so I could stop paying attention.
I wanted to understand what had changed.
So the monitoring became much more aggressive.
I created downtime schedules that prevented devices from accessing Wi-Fi when I wasn’t home.
I turned Wi-Fi off on my iPhone for more than a week.
I installed network-monitoring software.
I checked cellular usage.
I had Cox audit its own numbers.
I started watching Google Photos backup activity.
I compared heavy teaching days with ordinary workdays.
Some of those steps turned out to matter more than others. At the time, I didn’t know which was which.
And as the end of the billing cycle approached, I did the math every morning.
How much data do I have left?
How many days do I have left?
What can I afford to use today?
There was no champagne when I made it to the end of the cycle under the 1,280 GB limit.
But there probably should have been.
The crisis was over.
The investigation wasn’t.
And that’s another distinction leaders sometimes miss.
Getting through the crisis is not the same as solving the problem.
For a while, my internet usage looked considerably more normal.
But I’m still watching it.
Not obsessively.
I’m establishing what normal actually looks like.
That’s the leadership lesson I’ve taken from all of this.
We don’t need more dashboards simply because technology allows us to create them.
We don’t need to measure everything.
But we do need to know which indicators tell us whether something important is beginning to change.
And we need enough familiarity with those indicators to recognize when a number doesn’t belong.
Had Cox never sent that 75% email, I don’t know when I would have noticed.
My internet still worked.
My bill still got paid.
From the outside, everything looked normal.
That’s the uncomfortable thing about early warning signs.
They rarely look urgent.
Until you understand what they’re warning you about.
So maybe the leadership question isn’t:
“Am I paying enough attention?”
Maybe it’s:
“What would tell me something important is changing before it becomes a crisis?”
Because problems don’t always arrive with alarms.
Sometimes the alarm arrives after the problem has been quietly building for a while.
I coach and consult with leaders on exactly this kind of thing — not internet bills, but the signals we miss until they become emergencies.
