That Awkward Moment Your Internet Goes Down And You Don’t Know What To Do With Your Life…

So, yesterday’s blog post was pretty late… In fact, I got it published with only about an hour and a half to spare before the stroke of midnight. Here’s what happened:

I went to karate class, since it was Thursday night. Class went well, I got a solid workout in. I had started drafting yesterday’s blog post during the afternoon, but other obligations got in the way and I put it off until I got home from karate.

Since life rarely cares about our plans, I got a text message from my wife right at the end of class. Apparently, our internet was down. My wife had tried resetting our modem a number of times and there had apparently been no planned internet outages in our area.

You know that mild feeling of panic you get in your stomach when the elevator you expected to go up suddenly went down? I had a problem. I’ve consistently posted at least once a day for the past 93 days! If I didn’t manage to post to my blog prior to midnight, I would lose that streak.

I explained to my wife that I would grab my laptop and head to a location with free wifi to complete my post prior to midnight. I got home by 9 pm and this left me only three hours to shower, launder my karate gi (uniform), get to a location and review and publish my post.

By the time I had finished showering and got ready to leave the house, my wife had contacted our service provider and got the internet running again. Not only was I eternally grateful to my faithful partner for getting things up and running again, but we realized the source of the problem: my son!

Turns out that my loving progeny took it upon himself to explore our high-speed modem. When he accidentally unplugged one of the network cables, he plugged it back into the first port that fit. This obviously didn’t work out and resulted in our internet being down. An IT specialist was able to confirm this and guide us to hooking the cable in the proper port.

Once the smoke settled and I was able to sit in front of my keyboard and finish my post, it got me to thinking about how tethered we are to our technology. The sense of panic that set in when I found out I had no internet was borderline ridiculous!

Technology is wonderful. It’s brought us a long way from where we were. And the internet has revolutionized the modern life in many ways. We use the internet to shop, pay bills, make appointments and stay in contact with people across the world (exhibit A: this blog!)

But sometimes I think our dependence on technology has become too intense. There was a time, not so long ago, when I could have said “who cares” to hearing that the internet was down and read a book or took a walk instead.

Albert Einstein once said “It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity. I hope that someday, our humanity might yet surpass our technology.”

Let’s make sure that while we enjoy the benefits that modern technology has provided that we don’t allow ourselves to become slaves to it, as well. ☯