Imagine a day without the internet. Is that a scary picture or a good one for you? We had no Internet access at my office for hours today. None. For hours. It was awful. By 10:00 a.m. my hallway (the e-business team hall) was filled with twitchy, shaky, pale co-workers muttering to themselves about storming the Starbucks across the street for wireless access.
Pretty much my whole job involves accessing the internet for one reason or another. Every five seconds I would think “I’ll just pop on the internet to look up…oh.” “Well, I can go run this report…oh.” “I know, I’ll just go assign some keycodes…oh” To make it even better, I had a project that had to be done today that was impossible to do without getting online. I had even made sure that I got in to work earlier than usual, just to ensure I had plenty of time to work on it. Ha!
I contented myself with sending emails for a while – all those little follow-up emails I’d been meaning to send and just hadn’t gotten to for one reason or another. That worked until I realized that we were having email problems too. Delivery was very spotty, and I couldn’t get emails from anyone outside our building. I ended up resorting to emailing people from my trusty Sidekick. I love that phone. I admit it was a frivolous purchase, but I don’t care. It makes me happy.
Then I discovered how hard it is to eat lunch at your desk without the internet. I had no idea how dependent I’ve become on lunchtime entertainment via the computer. I couldn’t read blogs, I couldn’t go check out eonline, I couldn’t do anything! Verizon finally fixed the problem around two. You could actually hear the huge sigh of relief that raced from one side of the building to the other as people realized they had their connection back.
Please, please, please, dear Internet, don’t ever leave me again.
