Disconnectivity

After about 2 1/2 weeks of being off line, we have managed to ditch our broadband service provider Tiscali in favour of O2 and we are finally connected again to friends, family and The World!

In the first few days of being off line, I thought it might be quite refreshing not to be always available, always connected, always wired. I decided to make the best of the situation by spending my evenings and weekends reading, catching up with friends on phone or meeting face-to-face and taking the time to do other things that did not involve sitting at the computer. And for a time it was quite relaxing not to have to deal with e-mails or instant chat messages popping up on the computer screen at regular intervals. I also re-discovered the joy of sitting in my favourite armchair with a book and a glass of wine on a cold winter evening.

But after a little while, it felt like we were on a desert island and out of the loop and I couldn’t resist the urge to check e-mails. We managed to stay in touch by accessing our e-mail accounts on my partner’s iPhone — which is great for reading e-mails but a bit fiddly and clumsy for writing anything more than a few lines. Also pretty soon, unless I regularly checked e-mails via my sister’s computer or at work, my inbox would become bloated and unmanageable, with email upon email piling in at an unstoppable pace.

It also became very frustrating not being able to keep my blogs updated. I did manage one short audio podcast by phone but I prefer to write my blog posts and having to “perform” the phoneblog all in one take is somewhat stressful and not something that I wanted to do regularly. Not being able to blog made me realise how much it is a part of my life and how much it connects me with other bloggers and my readers who engage with me online.

I also usually keep in touch with my sister and a number of other friends by Skype. My sister and I have a video chats most days in a week — the conversations are usually about nothing much and are the equivalent of having a bit of the natter over the garden fence in the real world but I enjoy them as a way of staying in touch. We still managed to chat regularly on the phone that it’s just not the same — there seems something formal about a phone call these days and of course, you don’t have the fun of seeing the other person in real time.

We were invited to dinner at a friends place and I realised that I couldn’t check the train times online as I would normally do. I also had to dig out the old tattered A-to-Z to work out the directions to her house instead of merely typing in her postcode to Google Maps and printing off the map and handy directions.

My calendar and diary are online, as is my task list. So being off-line meant that my whole life, literally, fell apart as I had no idea what I was doing all where I was meant to be on any given day. I had to hurriedly dig out a paper diary and transfer all my appointments and tasks from the online applications onto it. (I did used to back everything up onto my computer at home, syncing the online applications with Outlook, but that didn’t help me when I had to check my calendar and tasks at work but had updated my home computer in the meantime without it syncing with the online version.)

My parents in Malaysia don’t have a computer so we keep in touch by fax. The only thing is that I fax them via e-mail, using faxtastic.co.uk, which also allows me to receive faxes as e-mails. So being off-line meant that I was also disconnected from them.

There was also a day when I would have liked to have worked from home so that I could go to a doctor’s appointment — and because of remote access to my work computer is, I would normally have been able to do that. However, being off-line, meant that I had to postpone the appointment to another time and go into the office instead.

What’s more, I couldn’t even do my grocery shopping, which I normally do online, nor could I shop for books and DVDs from Amazon. I actually had to go into physical shops to do all that!

It really has been quite startling, these last couple of weeks, as it has really revealed how dependent I am on being connected to everyone and everything via the Internet. It was only about 10 years ago that I had first heard about this Internet thingy and at that time, I wasn’t very convinced as to its usefulness. Is it just me that I am a net Holick? Or is this how everyone runs their lives too these days?

Photo: thanks to elvis_payne from flickr.com (CCL)