Robert Kingett
chapter 1
Day one without Internet... and Email.
I have done it. I have done something that I didn’t think I would b able to do, that I would surely go insane from and have to back down from the challenge on the first day.
I lived through a day without internet.
It's 9:00 PM as I write this and I have to say that today was a bit alright and a bit nerve racking at the same time.
When I first wake up in the morning there's a click in my brain. It's a default mantra that I listen to every morning without fail, at the same hour every day like a perfectly scheduled school day. The thought invades my brain even though I know that my wireless driver on my laptop has been uninstalled and everything is deactivated that contains a wireless component. Before I even get dressed, hop inn the shower, brush my teeth, I simply have to do something because its engraved into me.
I have to check my email.
Slowly rising from my slumber, my feet pad their way over to my desk where I sit at the computer as always. Even though my screen reader tells me that there isn’t a wireless connection, because I have, indeed, uninstalled the driver last night at 12 AM sharp, I still perform the familiar task of pressing the windows key, plus R, and typing in Thunderbird, where all of my email is housed through an IMAP connection. When the program loads I see all of my old email messages there. I know what's supposed to happen next. The client is, now, supposed to connect to the server to display email to me but nothing happens.
I wait for the bold unread messages to trickle into my email inbox, possibly containing replies from my editor and a whole host of other wanted and unwanted emails.
Nothing happens and I want it to happen. I want to see emails in my inbox but I don’t. I open the client again and close it again, repeating the process just so that I can have something to look at. It hasn't even been a full morning and I am already lost without the information super highway.
I soon give up on trying to make an Internet connection spring from thin air without any wireless or Ethernet drivers in my laptop and sit down on my bed. I call one of my friends, his voice scratches from sleep as he utters,
“hello?”
“hi!” I say, feeling good because at least I'm making some sort of connection to some human being, In the morning.
“what's up Rob?” he asks sounding a bit more awake and a bit worried. “you never call me.”
“I know,” I say. “I'm having a problem.”
“Oh?” he says, “what's that?”
“Well, I can't check Email.”
I'm sure that If you talk to any older person, someone who has grown up before the twitter and even computer generation, and if you swing the conversation around to the worldwide web, usually you will hear that computers and the Internet are ruining our youth. Naturally, they see the bad of the Internet but they don't see the good that the Internet produces as well. With Email, for instance,
A while ago I read an article in a business journal. It was talking about telemarketers and sales representatives and their Email activity. It discussed that the answering machine is dying out because there are a lot of people who just don't want to sit and listen to a lengthy voice message with an ending exclamation to, "call me back!" it stated that people are more likely to look at Email and reply to Email, simply because of the less annoying nature. Now, younger people, about my age, in their twenties, find it annoying to actually listen to voice-mails.
With Email there are no awkward pauses or, indeed, any pausing at all as the person looks for something. With Email a reply can be composed over time, making sure that people get all the information they want to get in one central place. Plus, you don't see at the bottom of an Email, please Email me back at your earliest convenience... here's my Email! You can just hit a few keystrokes and compose a reply.
The article detailed an experiment where emails were answered and answering machine messages were answered, all the while the test presenters were documenting how thoroughly and often a response each medium received. It came as no surprise to me that the quicker and more detailed responses were via Email. People on the phone had to call the person back only to say that they would have to send them an Email because the information was either, too big to fit into a traditional phone conversation, or that it would take them a while to gather all the information and they would just rather send an attachment in an Email.
I am guilty of this too, even though a phone call may have been quicker in some aspects it just wasn't a gateway for me to send and or receive information, mainly because my brain hadn't been wired that way.
To my narrow minded point of view I assumed, and assume now that people just won't have as much information to give if they talk to me on the phone. I Email because I seek absolute answers. I don't want to call someone to come out of the conversation empty handed.
Throughout the day I am doing various things to keep my mind busy and occupied simply because I don't have Email to look at to keep me occupied. The day rolls out in a mesh of activities that I flit back and forth between as if I am clicking hyperlinks. I read, I watch TV, I begin to listen to some audio books I had on my Victor Reader Stream for years, I walk around my apartment complex and talk to people that I usually would never talk to, mainly because I don't have emails to reply to. No one calls me on the phone or sends me a text so I am left to my own devices. The day passes by really well, actually, really well indeed.
I haven't settled into a routine yet. I'm all over the place. I'm sure the wind is laughing behind my back as I flit from talking to someone to riding the elevator in my apartment complex, imagining what shammy subject lines are in my inbox and feeling a bit insane because I really, really, want to delete them.
I'm not muttering hyperlinks yet but I am just as susceptible to becoming insane as others. Who knows, perhaps the last entry in this journal, AKA diary, whatever you want to call it, will be a bunch of links to my obituary and snippets of my last YouTube clips. We shall definitely see.