Yesterday afternoon, I got home from the gym, like I
do almost every day of the week. I proceeded to my routine of grabbing a bottle
of water and heading upstairs to my black leather recliner where I grab my
Google Nexus to check my email, track the stock markets, peruse Facebook, and
check the news. Only, something was wrong. Something was very wrong. A troubling message flashed across the screen, “unable
to open page, check your internet connection.”
Thus began a frantic thirty minutes of that most
rare and hopeless exercise, me as an IT troubleshooter. The only thing I was
able to discover was that none of the internet connection-reliant devices in my
house were functioning. My computers were worthless, the television was out, and
even my cell phones could not make an internet connection. To make this
untenable situation even worse, my wife wasn’t home. See, in the Dunnevant
house, there is only one person with the patience and technological savvy to
get to the bottom of something like this, and she was at the grocery store or
some such worthless place instead of here fixing the internet. Soon, Kaitlin
got home. I asked her what to do. Aren’t the millennials supposed to be
tech-savvy? She walked into my study and peered at the router thing with the
blinking lights for a minute then confessed, “Who am I kidding? Where’s Mom?”
Thirty hellish minutes later Pam got home and began
barking instructions. Nothing she tried worked. Apparently this outage was “ice
storm related” and would require a visit from a Verizon Fios Professional who
would be glad to service us Thursday between the hours of one and five.
WHAT???!!! We can put a man on the moon, but let one eighth of an inch of
freezing rain fall from the sky and our internet goes out? What are we to do
for the next 48 hours for Pete’s sake? Don’t these people know that Christmas
is coming? How are we supposed to do our online shopping, HMMM???
The rest of the night I walked through the house
like one of those Zombie Apocalypse people, trying to find something to do with
myself. I couldn’t watch the game. I couldn’t play Words With Friends, I couldn’t
stalk my Son on Facebook. All of a sudden a bitter realization blazed across my
consciousness. I am a slave to the
machine. Despite all of my efforts at independence, all of my vain conceits about
being contrarian, I have been co-opted by big brother’s grid. My life has
become dependent on connectivity. They’ve got me.
So I sit and wait for the nice man driving the
Verizon van to arrive.
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