Apple | Keira's Place

Blog by Kate Wyland

Our internet was out for over two days this week. Some vandals decided to attack the phone system for our area, and although we didn’t lose phone service like many others, we did lose our DSL. My husband and I were so totally frustrated. Couldn’t get on to check and respond to email, except by smartphone, which isn’t the most convenient way. Couldn’t keep up with Facebook and Twitter, couldn’t schedule my blog or respond to comments. Couldn’t check the news, do research or check the spelling of a word the easy online way. Couldn’t send out the last two entries I was judging for a writing contest. We were totally lost. Finally we drove 30 minutes away to another town to get access.

For someone who grew up long before the internet, cell phones and GPS, it was amazing to be hit again with how dependent we are on our modern technology. When we tried to actually talk to a real live person at the phone company to get more info than the canned “The internet difficulties will be fixed in 24-48 hours” message, they wanted our account information. Since I use auto-pay online, I didn’t even have a recent copy of the phone bill and couldn’t give them that number. Scream and pull the hair! Eventually we did get a human being, but got the same canned response. It took three days to get our DSL service back.

This experience reminds me of an incident that happened with our first computer—pre-Apple and PC days. We had a MSAI-8080 made from a kit, which had a whole 16K of RAM and two 8” floppy disk drives that held a total of 128K of data. We also had a hand-assembled Heathkit monitor and an old telex machine for printing. Talk about a dinosaur! But it had something quite new at the time—word processing software. Wordstar, the grandmother of them all.

I soon grew enamored of a system that allowed me to correct mistakes easily and even move text without re-typing everything. Then one morning I couldn’t get to my file. It had disappeared. Frantically, I tried everything in my limited repertoire, but no luck. I was devastated. All my work was gone. I’d only been using the computer for about a month and I couldn’t believe how dependent I’d become on it. The thought of going back to the typewriter was totally unacceptable.

Despondent, I turned the computer off and went on with my day. That evening, when my husband came home, he flipped it on and wonder of wonders my file was back! (I’ve since learned that turning the computer off and on can solve a multitude of problems.) From that day to this, computers have become a bigger and bigger part of my life. I literally don’t know how I’d function without one.

If all your electronic gizmos stopped working, which would you miss the most? Computer, cell phone, e-reader, mp3 player or something else? What can’t you live without? Or would it matter to you at all? Several friends and family are virtually electronics-free, except for TVs. I’m sure the fiber optic sabotage didn’t bother them at all.

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Learn more about Kate Wyland:
Website: http://katewyland.com/
Blog: http://katewyland.com/blog

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