RSSFriday B.S.: A World without Internet (for a Few Hours at Least)
Dec 08
Humor, Life in Digital Internet Comments Off
Yesterday at work, the internet connection for the entire campus went down. They blamed it on a physical hardware failure, though I am certain it was more like some guy spilling his completely full Dunkin Donuts Caramel Creme hot latte on the server because he stupidly removed the top because he doesn’t like the little sippy hole, and come on, he never spills! So instead of grabbing every available paper towel, or ripping off his shirt to soak up the spill before it leaked between the cracks of the casing and marinated the processor, this guy fell to his knees and screamed a holy “No!” into the stratosphere at having dumped $3.99 worth of caffeine and sugar (and some coffee) that was his only real sustenance until lunch. And that, my friends, sent the campus into a spiral.
Living without internet was a little like being blinded by solar glare. All of the sudden, the world no longer made sense. The day was washed out, hard to decipher. Everyone slowed down to avoid a crash.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I went well over five business hours without internet or e-mail, and my inbox was still empty at the end of the day. I did not really miss anything as a practical matter. But the internet has become so ubiquitous to my daily routine, that being without it makes me uncomfortable.
This paradigm unfortunately scares me a little. It is similar to watching your coworkers make plans to order lunch for delivery and no one asks you if you want to buy in even though your (rusting, metal) desk is perfectly placed in the center of the room so everyone has to walk by you twenty times a day and you actually bought (and already ate) your lunch. You know you are being irrational, but you feel hurt nevertheless.
I know I will survive if I don’t check my e-mail every five minutes. In fact, I sleep eight hours a night religiously and I never wake up in cold sweat because I hadn’t been able to check my e-mail 96 times since I went to bed. Some days, yeah, I do immediately race to my lap top to see what I missed (usually nothing) and some days, I don’t bother checking e-mail or read news recaps until I get into the office in the morning.
I have a very adversarial relationship with technology, but somehow that has not stopped me from becoming addicted to the web. Part of it is simply the nature of the modern life and part of it is the flexibility of information exchange that the internet offers. Either way, without hesitation, I pay for monthly high-speed DSL at home when I balk at the price of basic cable.
Periodically, I make a joke about what life must have been like before the internet. I mean, can you imagine how people communicated when there was no e-mail, and you couldn’t check your bank balance online, and you had to hand-write a check for every bill? Yeah, it was not that long ago. My first e-mail address was assigned to me by my college, and e-mail was read on a dos screen. In fact, for research papers in college, I still went to the library and combed through the card catalog or roamed the stacks organized by Dewey Decimal. But somehow in the last decade, that has become unthinkable.
Technology innovations have always changed the face of how we live to the point where we cannot live long without it. So maybe I should not be surprised that as soon as internet access collapsed on campus yesterday, it sent me and a lot of other employees and students into a (temporary) panic. Did I mention that I raced home after work and the first thing I did was boot up my laptop and check my e-mail? Pathetic? Maybe. But as soon as I saw my (empty) inbox, the world made sense again.
