Disconnected

The last 48 hours have been hell. Was I in a life and death fight or perhaps experiencing an emotional trauma. No the sad fact is all that happened was my ADSL went down.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning disaster struck a British Telecom exchange in Central London. A mixture of fire and flood wiped the place out (quite biblically).

When I awake I have something of a routine. I stagger out of bed and head towards the bathroom. As I pass my bank of machines I hit each power button and while I take care of the biologicals my windows on the world hum to life.

I return with clean teeth and a skip in my step at the meta day ahead (no really). Falling into my chair I turn on each monitor and prepare to ingest the world.

A cold shudder runs down my spine….

‘Email update failed’ ‘Downloads were stopped’ ‘Cannot Connect’

I cast my eyes down and see red lights on the router where there should be green.

Another shudder….

A small, surprisingly optimistic, voice in my head says ‘temporary glitch’ I reboot the router. Network. Wireless. Pause. 5 seconds RED! Damn!

I sit there and stare at the blasted thing assuming perhaps that an unwavering glare at the offending light would turn it the correct colour. It does not.

Back to bed. Up. Still red. Oh dear lord. Wave of nausea. I phone my ISP and hear a disturbingly sombre recording. ‘Major Outage’ ‘Flooded exchange’ ‘ETA 2 days’

Collapse.

My phone gave me a one way connection to twitter but that felt like shouting into the wind. Realising that DMs were also sent to my phone gave me some limited sustenance.

Then a word popped into my mind – Dial-Up.

I then discovered not one of my current machines has a modem installed. Ouch!

Visiting the cupboard of discarded tech I pulled out a dusty old laptop with a cracked screen and missing ‘L’ key. Like an alcoholic discovering a long lost bottle I actually cheered.

Since getting always on broadband I have actually missed the modem song as it connects. The beeps and bops and alarming thrums were like the creaking door opening onto a virtual world.

Sadly what was once a miracle is now like a slow painful death. Even the simplest web site crawls down the screen like virtual treacle.

It was, however, just enough to stop me slipping into the heart of darkness that is complete internet withdrawal.

Now all is back.

What have I learnt from this experience? That my dependence on a fast reliable internet goes core deep? Perhaps. Most of all though that the connections I have developed online are some of the most important connections in my life.

Now on to YOUTUBE!