Internet access was down most of the day at work, a connection issue with Verizon’s end of our T1 line. A few people left early to “work from home,” they claimed, implying they were stymied without the internet. Our receptionist was edgy because she always checks her horoscope first thing each morning online; fortunately, I had picked up a tabloid paper on the way to work, so I leant it to her, and after reading her day’s fate, she was less jittery.
I hadn’t fully realized how much I used the ’net until it wasn’t there. It was the minor web-based things I immediately missed, like updating my blog and reading those of others, which I often do over my morning coffee if I arrive to work early.
But as my work day began, I went through Google withdrawal. I regularly use it as an all-purpose spellchecker (I type "laise fairee" and Google pipes up: Did you mean: "laissez faire"), as well as a fact checker and especially a White Pages. Several times I needed to call a company where I only knew its name and the city in which it was located. Normally, I would track it down on Google in five seconds. Instead, I had to call the oldschool (xxx) 555-1212 information line, like in the good old days.
I never thought I’d miss perusing the Yahoo! News over lunch at my desk like I nearly always do, which made me realize the internet is my sole source of hard national news Monday through Friday.
Email to and from addresses outside our company was down, too, so I uttered many phrases over the phone along the lines of, “Can you email me that? Uh, I mean, could you read me that over the phone and I’ll write it down?” Most of my job is crafting mighty prose in Word and talking to people on the phone, so I didn’t miss email too much, but I do like it for conveying simple, quick facts. None of this “1,001 word message” or “infinite re:” bullshit that would be better served by a minute-long phone call. Still, I find a surprising number of businesspeople opt for email where a call would get the job done more quickly; apparently, the internet has stunted them to human-to-human communication.
Since in-house email was working, a coworker of mine in the production department and I amused ourselves by rapid-firing each other random photos from our computers’ Pictures folders, since we couldn’t send each other idiot internet links to photos like we usually do. She sent me one of her boyfriend dressed like Tyler Durden and acting crazy inside a Salvation Army thrift store, which was good, but I think I won the contest with this photo of what would appear to be a young Jerry Orbach dressed in a space-age leisure suit.
