boot in recovery mode (hold "shift" key down at bios end process to get the grub menu on a single OS installation) and activate the network from that...
as i'm not an icons fan (i prefer the list view) i will not help you to format the icon text (but i suppose it can be tweaked via the System Settings...
i does not know about chrome, but with chromium (should be quite close i suppose) i've searched some times ago to resolve the same issue. And finally...