I have been reminded of exactly how important the online world has become in business – aside from the fact in my own life. The reminder has taken the form of the company I work for having first an intermitant then an absolute failure of their adsl connection. Adsl is hardly the most reliable at the best of times – the very fact that cable is not in my area makes me unhappy and dream of my fond cable memories. This week though has been one great narly mess of failure from our ISP through to Mr Undependable BT line provider.
This week all started out so relatively promising too with eventual success of the Saturday network bashing. On Monday my venture to the car to drive to work resulted in me finding a rather SOS call from my work. The happy network appeared to be having a rather grey Monday and didn’t want to go to work – I soon gained that feeling after hours of switching wires, scratching my head and trying to breathe life into a dying connection. This net connection didn’t go gracefully though as it lingered tempting us with 5 minutes at a time of online “here is what you could have won” antics. Finally, it gave into fate and died a death. This followed by the last two days becoming a blur of phoning support, mustering a BT engineer out of the ether by tempting him with coffee and travelling to and from my work to get email. I think it was at the stage of the fifth hand delivery of email messages that I gave up any will to live.
Kind of made me think about how really I would manage along with everyone else without the web. I am a bit amazed at how easily we have all become dependent on it. Maybe a homer simpson cable wire love moment should now be aimed at the network cables. I probably am one of the major culprits and the very fact that my job depends on the web kind of means the dole queue upon removal. There are loads of arguments agains the online love we as a human race have leapt into. I am probably too in love to even contemplate these.
What these past groundhog router watching days have given me apart from leg ache and footballer thighs from running between offices; is the thought of how dependent we are on it. I don’t overly think about it apart from recognising it. The old saying about not noticing it until it is gone is true. A world without web probably would mean a different career and a resulting different me. That might sound rather overly dramatic, but online has become such a part of life for so many it is the case. The numerous activites we have grown to depend on the web for, covers every area of our life. I don’t think of this as bad, this is all rather a comment than a speculation. When you don’t have it you tend to have a lot of time to think as a web designer. The BT engineers are going to have to replace every wire between us and the network so plenty more thinking time on the cards.
