Disconnection

When we got home on Friday night, the phone line was dead and we had no connection to The Net.

M called Telstra right away (thank goodness for the mobile) but given that it was 7pm on a Friday night, there was nothing they could do until Monday, maybe Tuesday. (Tuesday?!?! I tried not to dwell on that.)

I hadn’t realised how much we rely on The Net.

We lost all access to the simplest information. M needed to buy some computer equipment for his aunt – we didn’t know the number of the dealer, or their opening hours on a Saturday. Maybe we should keep the print phone books when they’re delivered this year. But phone books don’t allow you to browse what a computer dealer has in stock, or compare prices with other dealers…

We had to buy a newspaper to check movie screening times.

No news on demand. Waiting for the radio, or worse, the tv, was terrible. What’s happening?? I don’t care that Paris Hilton’s going to jail or that a football player’s back in town from rehab…

No access to a few things I’d saved in gmail, to read later. Sigh…

Worst of all, I had no idea what people were doing.

I lost all desire to get up early – nothing to do at 5am! – and slept in to 8am.

The weekend was very busy. We started Dutch language class (more on that later), did all the usual weekend chores (food shopping, laundry, cleaning), visited family, went to the park, took Paco to play with canine friends… So even if we’d been connected I wouldn’t have had much time to spend on the computer.

I really didn’t like the feeling of being out of the loop, though. All the old media choices that were available to me were static, limited, and utterly unsatisfactory. I felt isolated and unconnected, and that feeling was always there – even though I told myself that if anything really earth-shattering happened someone would call and tell me – I felt cut off and like I had no control over all of my usual channels. It was quite unlike other weekends where I decide to switch off and feel perfectly fine about it. Perhaps this past weekend was different due to the lack of choice in our disconnectedness.

To Telstra’s credit, their technician called just after 7am Monday morning and came over to check our line at 7:30am. It took two and a half hours, but he discovered that the neighbours’ electrician had cut our phone line right through – our line goes through their property – causing the immediate and unequivocal black-out. He fixed it, and in the process also cleaned our apparently corroded line up so that our connection is now twice as fast as it used to be. Hoorah!