A rare event occurred last weekend—we were at home and we had no Internet.
“Big deal”, you’re thinking.
Yeah, well: 1) it was another rainy weekend 2) we weren’t doing anything special 3) we weren’t offline by choice, Bell had technical issues.
On Saturday afternoon, we suddenly realized we couldn’t access any website. It was rather frustrating—we were connected but the pages weren’t loading. Even Google’s homepage took fifteen minutes to display properly. It was like using dial-up again. Well, worse actually because dial-up is painfully slow but at least, pages do load eventually.
We called Bell. Technical support said there were issues in our area and that they would be solved within two to twenty-four hours. “Twenty-four hours like… like a day?” we shrieked. “What are we going to do? Talk to each other? Play board games? Clean the house? Make babies?”
“It’s okay”, shrugged Feng, always stoic. “Let’s just go see a movie. Let me just check the… oh fuck. How do we check the movie listings without Internet?”
It’s called reading the newspaper’s entertainment section. Of course, we don’t buy the Sun, the local tabloid, because I’m strongly allergic to its conservative backward editorials and reactionary stance. Fortunately, we are used to local movie schedules and knew that if we showed up around 6:30 p.m., we could probably catch a flick. We ended up watching The Hangover II—it’s funny, not bad for a sequel. Plus it was in regular boring 2D without fuzzy special effects.
We are not technology addicts. I couldn’t care less about my cell phone (in fact, I rarely pick it up and often forget it in my bag, much to my friends’ annoyance) and we don’t have any fancy gadgets such as iPads, iPhones, iTouch, eBook readers etc. But we both got used to relying on a high-speed Internet connection to get a lot done—checking bus schedules, watching the news, calling people through Skype, planning trips and events, working, shopping and relaxing.
I always feel like I discovered Internet years after everybody else did. In fact, it was only in 1999, while in China, that an engineering student took pity on me and created my first email address. I had never touched a computer before except to play pool on my dad’s Macintosh but I fell in love with the web right away, mostly because I was 16 years old and poor. At the time, web providers were trying to lure French people into the wonderful online world with a lot of AOL CD-ROMs. Getting online was sometimes challenging, between AOL’s perpetually busy signal and the erratic per-minute (and then eventually per-month) billing. But tons of things were suddenly available at our fingertips. We had a quick and cheap way to communicate, to download music, to share documents and to play.
Since that, I’ve been a huge fan of the online world. We used to have dial-up at home and then cable DSL. At night, we are both invariably typing on our respective computers, doing business, writing or editing pictures. I love having the world at my fingertips, getting lost in reading other blogs or obscure articles on Wikipedia. It relaxes me.
On Monday morning, Feng called me at work: “I’m back online! Internet is working!” It was a huge relief, mostly because it meant we wouldn’t have to spend a day at home waiting for a technician to show up “between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.” (gee, thanks, very easy…!).
And now we are back to our usual connected self. But we are strongly considering asking Bell to shut off our connection randomly, just once in a while. See, this weekend had been strangely relaxing without Internet.
It’s so funny that we panic without the internet, but I’m amazed at how relaxed I feel after a few days of being disconnected. I like your idea of randomly disconnecting yourself.
Seriously, I think I’m going to implement that! I need some down time 🙂
Haha, somehow I can relate to this post. See, here in Manila, apparently, there’s a cut fiber-optic cable and the Internet providers of my parents have been fixing it, resulting in 18-hour Internet outages. I agree that having no Internet sometimes can be relaxing, but given my personality, I schedule when I relax, and it sucks when I really need to be online and yet I can’t (such as when I have a paper to send to someone else, or when I need to buy an airline ticket).
Oh, I know, I’d rather be offline on my schedule too! I can imagine people were upset in Manilla, I find people in Asia are very connected and take Internet time seriously.
I avoid Bell like the plague because they refused to honour their phone promise not to make me pay for the modem+service with a certified cheque when I first arrived in Toronto. When I got to the Bell store they asked for the cheque, so I cancelled on the spot, walked 20m over to the Rogers kiosk and set up cable internet. I made *them* promise they wouldn’t market their cable TV service because I don’t have a TV!
I’m sure I’m not their target market, anyway!
To be honest, I had problem with both Rogers and Bell. We used to have Rogers Internet services until they suddenly cut off the services, supposedly because “we had a virus in our computer”. We scanned them (we have three computers between the two of us, used for entirely different purposes) and everything was fine. They still refused to reconnected us and said we were basically “punished” and would have to wait for a couple of weeks to be reconnected. We closed our account right away (no kidding!) and moved to Bell.
I use Cox Cable because it is the fastest and most dependable service available provider in Tulsa. Yahoo is the portal so my email address stays the same no matter who is the ISP.
Do what you can to lend support to the many who have been devastated by the several tornadoes which have struck so many victims.
I also have an account with Yahoo, it’s so practical. I wouldn’t want my account to be linked to a provider because it’s a pain to change email address if you switch provider!
Hi Zhu,
Remember that thing with the word “crisis” written in Mandarin? It is composed of the symbols “DANGER” + “OPPURTUNITY”.
Crisis always opens the door to new thinking, even if it always pisses us off at first.
I have so many things going on in my life and close the PC more. I think that my tendancy is decreasing my online hours(outside of blogs, e mail and work)…
I try not to spend too much time in front of the computer, but when the weather is bad, a laptop with an Internet connexion is a lifesaver! Fortunately, photography also drags me outdoors a lot 🙂
The same thing just happened to us last weekend! Thanks to Deutsche Telekom, we were without home phone and internet for 3 days (Friday afternoon to Monday morning)!!!! Luckily, we had already planned a night away on Saturday night so we were able to use the hotel’s wireless. I had my cell phone when at home on Friday and Monday but the reception in our house is really bad, so, to make a phone call, I had to go outside in the yard. What a pain! You don’t know how reliant you are on technology until it isn’t there anymore.
This is so true!
Plan B for us was to use the free wireless at Chapters (bookstore) or in a coffee shop, such as Second Cup or Starbucks. When I freelanced last year I would often spend quite a while working from a nice cozy coffee shop 🙂
Since having to wait 5 full weeks to be connected to the internet when we arrived in Paris, we have never had an outage … However, I’m loathing moving out of this appartment 😉
Five weeks? Wow! I know my parents waited for an insane amount of time before being connected to DSL as well, even though the company was already billing them!
We are so dependent on technology these days, aren’t we?
Tell me about it…!
No internet access? Arggg! I can understand the feeling of getting lost!
I was even more late than you getting an email address. I think I must have got one in 2002 or 2003 and only got the internet in 2006, but I caught up really quickly then!
Really? Wow!
I feel France was really backward when it comes to computers technology, most North American I spoke too had some computer class with Internet “training” in the 1990s.
I’m not surprised really…
Oh my god Zhu, we are internet brothers (or sisters)! I also “found” internet only in 1999 in my last year of highschool and before starting university I made an email account. I was so thrilled!
I hope you don’t have to go another day without internet! It’s brutal. That’s how I got an unhealthy addiction to video games – not good either.
Ah, this is why I don’t play video games: I know I could easily get addicted, to better not start!