Social Isolation and the Internet

We have been very fortunate in the past few years to have experienced few glitches in our technology at home. Yes, there was the occasional hard drive crash, but we have learned to back up everything with super redundancy. So the two-day Internet outage we just experienced was definitely out of the norm.

This may just be the world's most ancient modem...

When we first went down, we of course called Charter tech support, and again, with our learning from past experience, we moved through the automated menu (yes, I know how to restart the modem) in a few seconds to get to a real person. Unfortunately for us, our city was experiencing an outage, so we just sat back to wait. When our connectivity was still down 24 hours later, however, we began to suspect something else was afoot. This was confirmed when a quick survey of the neighborhood found that everybody else was up and running. Mr. F hunted back through our Charter bills (I confess to being an avid filer) until he found a direct phone line for Internet service. Interestingly enough, this number was no longer printed on the more current bills. The nice lady on the phone said she’d send out a tech person that day.

We never did find out exactly what happened to our service, which came on about an hour before the tech arrived. We thought we should let him look around anyway, so did not cancel the visit. Charter replaced our modem, which was an antique Surfboard, and all seems well.

What was interesting to me about this situation was how funny it felt to be without connectivity. I was wondering if my ACC was extra active due to my sense of isolation.

Yes, we do have phones and our iPad, but we live in an odd shadow where neither Sprint nor AT&T coverage is adequate to do much. We have to walk down our driveway to use our cellphones, so we are among the very few to retain a land line (which, I might add, was AWFUL during this last primary election–we are NOT representative of the American public in any way, shape, or form, so perhaps the pollsters will think of some new techniques). AT&T gives us one to two bars at home, which allowed us to check our email on the iPad, but not much else.  A trip to the Nautical Bean allowed us an opportunity to catch up with a bit more speed.

Karla, of course, was very unhappy with the situation, as she spends quite a bit of time on the Internet. She said she likes to look up definitions of words in particular. I did point out that we owned many hardcopy dictionaries, but she gave me one of those generational looks of disdain as if I’d suggested we go back to stone tools and arrowheads. 

So it’s back to work as usual this morning. I have to confess that I did accomplish quite of bit of writing in the absence of Internet intrusions, and I might just try turning off my email, etc. for certain periods of the day. I was just reading a fascinating article by Karon MacLean about the “cultural pasttime of interruption handling,” and her words seemed quite appropriate for the day.