I scroll, therefore I am.
The internet is down
The internet is down.
I got a text message from our internet service provider in the early morning hours letting me know.
“There is a service outage affecting your area. Restoration estimated by 11:30AM. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Oh, the horror! Oh, the catastrophe!
11:30? What am I going to do until 11:30? That’s hours away and I have things to do and now nothing I can do. I need to check my emails, I need to send them too, I need to scroll and see what people are saying, I need to amuse myself. Do you hear me? I need to amuse myself! The whole morning is shot now. The day is off to a terrible start and there’s nothing I can do. Unproductive, unconnected, and unamused.
This is what it used to be like before ethernet, wifi, and the iPhone. We had dial-up in the living room and it was always slow. The computer was off most of the time. Nowadays, we leave our computers on all day and pretty much all night too. Laptops go into sleep mode and are rarely completely off. I shut my computer down entirely only when I am commanded, by it, to restart it for the sake of an update every few weeks. But in the living room in 2001, you would sit down, turn on the computer, wait a few minutes, start up the internet, listen to that scratchy beeping of the dial-up modem, and be quick about whatever it is you were doing because mom or dad might be expecting a call.
If you were on the internet you couldn’t use the phone. The line beeped the busy signal for the person trying to get a word in. Some people had two lines, but not us. That was too fancy. Eventually we got something called Callwave. It was a computer program that allowed people to leave voice messages when you were on the internet. It was pretty cool and pretty high tech too. You could see when someone was calling on the monitor, sign out of AIM, click out of Internet Explorer, get offline, and call them back.
