“What do we do now … talk to each other?”
I don’t know who asked it. We were all in kind of a daze. A blur. Wondering what had happened. How this could be possible. What we would do next.
Was the Internet … the WIFI … the cable … even the daggone landline phone (who even has those anymore!?!) really out? And for two days?
There had been some kind of outage in the neighborhood cable lines. Trucks were dispatched and crews went to work fixing it. Little ants, all up in the lines. And fix it they did. Only, there was a bigger issue with our line, and no one thought to take care of it right then.
We knew this because no matter how many times we poked at our phones, tried to reset the modem or cursed at the remote control, no signals ever screamed from our devices, giving us the rush of data we sorely craved.
Funny how we’ve become so used to voice-activated devices that in crisis we ACTUALLY think yelling at them will get answers: “I am NOT going to say it again, ‘WHAT … IS … WRONG … WITH … YOU!?!’ Answer me or I’ll put you under the chickens’ perch again.”
Nothing. Silence. The world had gone dark. We sat around on the sofa, trembling. Staring at each other.
“What do we do now?”
It would be two days before someone could come and fix it.
“Do you realize what you are asking us to do?” I quizzed the cable rep when I was told how long it would take. “We could go cannibal by sundown! Do you really want that on your conscience.” (I was given the number of a crisis hotline.)
Then we settled into our new reality.
It was quiet. So quiet.
It harked back to the past. Like the Pilgrims. In fact, little known fact: The first words spoken by the Pilgrims as they disembarked on Plymouth were, “What do you mean there’s no WIFI?!? The brochure promised free, high-speed WIFI!”
They ALMOST turned around and went back, but there was a free continental breakfast with one of those self-service waffle-making stations, so they stuck it out.
I feared for us, this little Web-obsessed, data-hungry family. I feared the worst.
And yet somehow — and there is no scientific or medical reason why — not only did we survive, but we actually found it pretty pleasant. Kind of enjoyable. Rather liberating. We talked. We enjoyed the peace. We laughed and read books. (What are those? They’re really very wonderful.) We went to bed early and rose rested. Machines didn’t beep at us or send us things that we didn’t want, or that might steal our identity. We looked around and noticed the world and went about living, rather than streaming. I didn’t even know that was possible today!
Then the cable guy showed up, strung new wire from the street to the box, and all the world’s data flowed back in. We sighed. The quiet went away. And the peace.
But not all of it. Sometimes the WIFI goes out and you realize what you’ve been missing, and that you want to hold onto some of it. That’s probably why the Pilgrims stuck it out.