What I learned from losing the internet for two days
A couple weeks ago, a band of nasty storms rolled across the Midwest, knocking out my sister’s power in Des Moines and my internet in Chicago.
I was lucky that I kept my power. But to have electricity and no internet is disconcerting. My partner and I realized we lost service when we were pathetically trying to will Netflix to load, gaping like fish at the TV. How could it be gone???
If this had happened a year ago, I would have no trouble going to the cafe around the corner to go online. But under a pandemic, I don’t want to sit indoors in a public place for a sustained period of time. Planning a work day without online access and with limited options involved so many small questions I was tempted to say screw it and take the day off.
How much of this report can I write without the internet? Where can I go to work now? Should I go into my old office? Will my partner be able to come with me? Can I book a study room at the library? That’s safe, right? Would it be worth going to a public place with WiFi for, like, an hour? Should we call Comcast again? Would that even help?
The first day sans internet I was able to work from home. I lucked out in that I had offline access to Google Slides so I could continue writing my research report, and the changes would automagically update once I got online again. (I still took screenshots of all 40 slides I put together out of terror that my work would be lost). Emails, Slack messages would have to be answered on my phone using data.
The second day, my partner and I braved the public bus and a 45-minute commute to go to my old office. Turned out, this was the very last day my office was open before movers were coming to box everything up. Internet chatter suggested service wouldn’t be restored for two more days, and I was teetering on panic on how I could meet this work deadline. Miraculously, service was restored by the time we got home that night.
At first it seems that going a few days without the internet should not be that big a deal. On vacations this is how I prefer to operate. Lack of internet won’t force you to throw out food or prevent you from cooking; lack of internet won’t plunge you into darkness after the sun sets or prevent the air conditioning from working. I wish I could say I learned something meaningful from these few days without easy online access, how I learned to be more present or whatever.
But when your work and school depends on your ability to communicate with others, access tools, and information, your world is completely disrupted. You cannot do much of anything. The internet is knotted so tightly into our normal lives that to have it or not is not a real choice. It is the means by which we chat with our family and trade jokes with friends. We play games, order food, shop, exercise, look up directions, listen to podcasts and music. We look for jobs, check healthcare records, pay bills. Our daily lives are defined by being online, even more so now under the pandemic.
The thing I learned, rather, the thing that became visceral for me, was how vital the internet is to function in a modern society. I think we all knew this on some level. One hope I have coming out of this pandemic is that it’s laid this bare in an impossible-to-ignore way. This is how we live now.