You don't know how much you use something until it disappears from your life! For a week we had no Internet/email access. Our modem died of old age and it took until now to get back on the grid.
I will spare you the details of our saga - the week was not a high point in our lives. Except to say, there are those who provide support services who know what they are doing - and there are those who should find another way to make a living. Any other job will do for them.
In the meantime, we realized one by one, all of the things for which we use our Internet service. For starters - this blog (for those of you who follow us and may have wondered if the absence of new postings was due to neglect or some catastrophe in our lives). To you, we say we are back!
Of course, we could have gone to the library to gain Internet access. But doing so would have prolonged the crisis, because of long hours spent on the phone trying to get our system up and running with a new modem.
All out of our reach: directions to a friend's house, where to find a particular product, ordering on-line Christmas gifts, email, global news, FaceBook connections, the ability to email class proposals for the winter months, research for our writing, banking, paying bills. The list goes on and on.
The absence of instant connection led me to reflect on the place of technology in our lives. I thought about how I am not always "connected." An iPhone will not enter my life until sometime this winter. So my connection literally is grounded in my home study. And when I travel, I leave this connectivity at home and then I don't miss my Internet and email one bit!
Our family long ago drew clear lines between the need periodically to be completely gone from our busy lives. Other than leaving information behind on to how to reach each other (if possible) in case of an emergency, we all have appreciated this boundary. It has meant wilderness camping and trips to places where Internet capacity does not exist. Everyone needs "away time" to renew and refresh their spirits - something increasingly a luxury in the world of iPhone and iPads.
But there is another part of the story. Computer technology has overtaken us, like big cats slinking along silently in pursuit of some prey. There are computer chips everywhere, some very small and others more major in the size of their impact on our lives. And I wouldn't have it any other way!
As we used our car this past week, I visualized maneuvering a large computer down freeways and city streets. Vroom, vroom, here we go. It was an interesting image.
We bought a new car this past spring to replace an almost 8-year old van. We still haven't figured out all of this car's capacities - contrasted with our older simpler vehicle. Now, the radio tells us what song it is playing. There are seven ways to program how the doors unlock when we we arrive somewhere. The car tells you whether you are driving economically and what the temperature is outside. It is wired for satellite radio - and Bluetooth and . . and . . . and . . . While I remember the "good old days" when opening a window meant turning a crank. Would I trade our beautiful car for one the cars we drove when we were younger? Not on your life!
All of this technology enriches our lives in ways we usually don't realize until something doesn't function. And getting it running again often is a chore and takes time in lives in which we are conditioned to expect instant reward. In the tight economies of the world and the shifting of jobs globally via outsourcing, the lack of service has increased the problem of what to do when something doesn't work.
During this past week, I periodically moaned that all I wanted was for some nice man (in the past, computer maintenance was a male occupation) to come to our house and in an hour get things working. After all, years ago, it was a nice man who set up our DSL equipment for our computers . At the same time I marveled at how people at the other end of a phone line could burrow their way into our complex equipment and extract hordes of information to diagnose why we were having trouble getting a new modem to function.
The funniest memory I have about computerization was at the time of the transition from manual to computer banking. On a Tuesday evening, I had reconciled our bank account (using pencil and paper, which is how we used to do such a thing), so I knew exactly how much money we had in our bank account, to the penny. The next morning, Clem and I went to our bank at 8:00 am when the bank opened (a single bank in one location, before these giant banking corporations). Our intention was to make a withdrawal for a home project.
We were greeted with the news that we were over-drawn by hundreds of dollars. What?! As the morning unfolded, we were only the first in a long line of customers. The problem was traced to a computer with a mind of its own, which had been busy randomly taking money out of some accounts and depositing money in other accounts! Fortunately, computer-recording of bank transactions was in its infancy - and the bank had duplicate records on microfiche. At the end of the day, the bank gave us a pen with the bank's name on it.
Which reminds, I need to check my bank account now that I am back on-line. Of course my account needs me to check it every few days . . .
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