Last
Wednesday night a tremendous thunderstorm came through. A brilliant flash of
light followed by a booming thunderclap woke me from a deep sleep. Rain poured
down and I quickly fell back into the arms of Morpheus.
The
next morning we found we had lost Internet access, as well as land line phone
service, both supplied by a tower broadcasting to a receiver on our roof.
Apparently the lightning bolt that woke me also fried our receiver. Now, six
days later, the repairmen have not succeeded in getting our service restored.
Living
without Internet* access for six days has opened our eyes to our dependence on the
web for all kinds of information: news from every level from local to
international, messages from family and friends, and information about every subject.
We haven’t had television for a couple of years, and we don’t subscribe to
newpapers delivered to our door, so the radio has been our sole source of news.
By
the end of our first day without connection we had unearthed our dusty
dictionaries,
Roget’s
Thesaurus, and my cookbooks, such as my mother’s well-worn Betty Crocker from
1956.
This
Internet disruption has come at a critical time. My main goal for the coming
months is to get rid of many, many things that clutter our house. I’m
especially interested in paring down our library. (Books, and plenty of them,
dominate every room of our house except the bathrooms.) Now I know better than
to even consider disposing of reference books.
When
the Internet collapses, as someday it could,
we will still be able to find some of the information we need to conduct our
lives. In the meantime, we will be
able to enjoy the miracle of worldwide Internet connection, because the
technician just came in to tell me our connectivity is restored. Now I’m off to post this and then catch up on The New York Times crossword puzzles.
*The name “Internet,” created in the 1970s, means a
computer network connecting two or more smaller networks. Boy, has it grown in
the ensuing decades! Millions, if not billions, of networks are now connected.
Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer
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