Bricking modem

I have a Netgear CM500 that was working fine until yesterday afternoon. It all of a sudden stopped working. I happened to look out the window and saw a cox truck in front of my house. I thought that they were doing some work and waited a little bit. After a while, the truck was gone and the internet connection didn’t return. I contacted support to report the outage to be told, that it was my modem. I found it a very big coincidence that my modem would all of a sudden go bad when a cox truck was sitting in front of my house. But anyway, the reps refused to send someone out. 
So I head to Best Buy to get a new one since cox is closed anyway on Saturday. I come back home and call cox to activate the new modem, to be told there is an outage. So I wait until the outage is gone (12 hours), but now the old modem is still not coming online.

any idea on what I should do ? Activate the new one and be done with it (if it works) ? Don’t you find it odd that it went bad just when that truck was in front of my house (i live in a dead end)