24 Hrs Without Internet. A Survivor’s Tale

It’s not a scenario you imagine happening to you. I mean you know it’s possible of course, but it’s unreal. It happens to someone else, never to you. Until it does. I am now a survivor. I lived through it and I bring word of my trials. I’m seriously thinking of getting a T-shirt pronouncing the same.

Yes, dear reader. Two days ago…my Internet went down.

It was a pretty great day. I’d finished my work even earlier than usual and was casually trying to find the perfect armor for my guardian on Guild Wars 2.  I’d received feedback that it looked a little too homoerotic and was wondering if I needed a change. Was fiddling around with sampling various chest pieces when my game disconnected. This is a rare occurrence, but it does happen. I just thought I’d relog in. But it didn’t work. I tried to access Gmail. And nothing happened. I saw the dreaded “Sending request…” on Chrome’s status bar and knew that something was wrong with the net connection.

I still didn’t panic. Just two days before, it had hiccuped only to reappear 5 minutes later. So I disconnected my modem and plugged it back in. That’s what fixed the problem then. Only this time…it didn’t work. “No problem” I thought. I’d just leave it alone for a short while and wait for it to come back. So I went to bathe and took my time. 15 minutes later I stepped out of the shower to see if it had connected. It hadn’t. Now I was beginning to get anxious.

So I shaved and did my meditation in a relaxed lazy manner, but every now and then my eyes would flick to the modem and find the “Online” indicator still dark. It was mocking me. Making a joke out of everything I held dear. The reality was starting to sink in. But I still clung to desperate hope that the problem would fix itself. I resolved to do what I’d been putting off for a month – get a haircut. Surely that will be long enough.

The tale of that haircut is the subject of another post entirely. Suffice to say that it served an additional purpose other than the shearing of my hair. You see, I can’t even make calls without Internet connectivity. We don’t have a traditional landline. Anupa of course has a smartphone but she wasn’t around. What do I need smartphone connectivity for after all? So an added bonus of getting a haircut was using their phone to make a frantic call to Anupa and tell her to call BrightHouse and fix the problem or send someone over. It goes to voicemail.

All the while at the back of my mind I’m thinking “It would have come on by the time I get home. Surely it can’t be out this long”. It didn’t. And it was. Now what?

I had my book to read of course. I can spend hours killing time. But I never like to read under compulsion. I hate doing anything out of compulsion. So I read for a while, put the book down, and stood up. I thought to myself that I’d better make the best out of the situation. Let me see…what have I been putting off?

So I spent a few minutes cleaning the bathroom sink. Then I cleaned out the microwave. I made the bed. I figure I might as well go to the leasing office and make the call to BrightHouse myself. Anupa can get busy at times and may not have even seen my message. I toddle over and call them. A sympathetic lady listens to my woes and reaffirms my view that this is a tragedy unprecedented in the history of mankind.

She says she’ll send someone over…tomorrow.

I stand there holding the phone to my ear, not fully grasping the implication of the sounds that emanate from it. One full day without net connectivity. It’s just words. They make no sense. Tomorrow, next year, a century later…they’re all the same as far as this is concerned. We’re nowhere in the vicinity of “tomorrow” yet! It’s still afternoon. All kinds of shit stands between me and the sun rising the next day. This…this can’t be happening.

As I walk back home, I take the long way around. After all, I have nothing better to do. It’s peaceful, my head clears and it’s not at all unpleasant. I’m not forced to do anything…the whole day is mine. When I get back, I’m still offline and once more try the ritual of powering the modem off and switching it back on again. And as I wait for the results, I find myself wishing for a curious thing…I start to be afraid of getting back online!

Maybe I’m a bit too jaded with sitting on the net. Perhaps I just want to relax and do something else. But…there’s so many things to do online that I’ll have to fight myself to not go there. I don’t want to do that. I want the decision to be taken off my hands entirely. And I get my half whispered, half fearful, poorly articulated wish…the light stays off.

And I’m free.

I spend the rest of the afternoon doing little things that no longer fill my life. Taking a nap, sitting for longer period on the couch reading my book. I feel restless so I decide to checkout the never before used “Gaming Center” on my laptop. And surprise surprise – I see Minsweeper! Memories of countless hours spent playing this irresistible logic game in college come flooding back to me. I used to be pretty good – damn good in fact. And I open it up at the expert level and start playing. My fingers are a bit rusty, but I get into the flow quickly, and before I know it I’m clicking, marking and double clicking away with wild abandon. Why have I not done this all these years? The interface and color schemes have changed in Windows 7 – but it’s alright :)

I hear the crack of thunder outside and the splash of fat drops of rain on the windows. I always love watching it rain, so I make myself a glass of lime juice as the storm builds up and the sky darkens and go sit on the outside steps. Quiet and stillness seeping into my bones. Nothing better to do after all, and this is the right place to be. How can I go elsewhere? And I’m grateful – happy even – that my Internet is down. Otherwise I’d be wrestling with myself right now to do something…but there’s nothing. I just sit and watch. Soon the rain becomes too fierce for me to continue staying outside. I go in, pull up the drapes and just sit watching the rain. And zone out.

Soon Anupa’s back from work. We have some episodes of Dexter available, so we watch one or two and then head out on foot for doughnuts. The rain has left the air cool and it’s a pleasant walk. And the insistence that usually builds inside my head telling me to go check my mail etc is missing. I’m able to fully appreciate what’s going on. And it’s good. We feel no rush to return home, so we sit and chat for a long while outside Dunkin Doughnuts with the coffee. Why don’t we do this more often? Or rather, why don’t I do this more often? It irks me that I don’t have enough self control to just push aside the net and do other things. It’s bruising to my ego to think that I need to be forcefully cut away from the pipe of bits and bytes to enjoy the quite things in life.

But am I alone in this? Do we not all face this problem? Anupa and I talked about the frequent power cuts in India and how inconvenient they made life. But we forget that sometimes during those power cuts we came together, sat in one place, talked, laughed, and had fun in a way that we never normally did with the TV blaring and each of us doing our own things. And though when the lights came on we were relieved, a part of us felt sad that our camaraderie was over. It didn’t have to be that way. Nothing prevented us from sitting down with each other anyway and enjoying ourselves. But it just didn’t seem to happen. We need to be forced into taking the time out to enjoy ourselves sometimes.

I get home and actually sit down to do some work! I really have nothing better to do after all. I usually use Dragon Dictation since it’s so much faster. But today I take my time typing, feeling the keys crackle under my fingers efficiently, and it’s a nice feeling. I won’t do it everyday, but it’s good to do this once in a while. Typing requires less energy than talking even though it takes longer. A little reading before going to bed, and so ends an almost complete cycle of a “no Internet” day.

Waking up next day was unique as well. No rush to check my mail, read the news, respond to blog comments. I have literally nothing to do since I finished up the next day’s work already. So I bathe, shave, and we go out to eat ever mindful of the fact that the Internet repair guy is coming between 10 and 12. Great breakfast, great conversation, and we go back to wait. He arrives at 11:55 – talk about sticking to the letter rather than the spirit! After some examination, it seems that there’s some problem with the hub downstairs. Half an hour later, my online light blinks back on. I open up a page…and it loads. My life is back on track.

It was something of an anti climax. No lightning flashes, no chorus of angels. Just a page loading. So bloody what?

It’s not as if I faced no real inconvenience. I was unaware of a potential client’s mail until three hours had passed and I had to send a reply using Anupa’s smartphone which was slow and inefficient. But everything turned out ok in the end. I want more days like this. So today while shaving, I made a decision. Every now and then – once a week maybe – I will spend a day offline. Perhaps I’ll check my mail every few hours, but that’s it. No gaming, no browsing. Just spending the day doing other stuff.

Starting today. Let’s see how it goes.