You Can Pry My Internet From My Cold Dead Hands
It's never quite so dark as it is when you're suddenly offline
The other night, I was out with my brother getting ready to see “Civil War” - a movie we both had mixed feelings about, for what it’s worth - when I got a call from my daughter notifying me that the internet was out. And not in the “turn the modem off and reset it” but just …out.
I did what I could from being 20 miles away - which was, as it turned out, very little. Unplugging everything didn’t work, hitting the reset buttons didn’t work. And it’s a moment like that when you realize just how incredibly tied we are to the internet.
This is not news, but it became very, very obvious.
For one, my daughter had homework to do. ALL of her homework is online. She barely has textbooks at all at this point. She and my wife scooped up the dog and headed over to my folks house to use their internet.
When I got home, even being here didn’t do squat - except I narrowed the problem down specifically to the router. We use a mesh router (eero) and it just kept blinking with a blue light. Fast forwarding to the next morning - I called support and they essentially reset my network and everything was back up and running fairly quickly.
But while it was out? Here’s what no longer worked:
As noted, my kids’ homework. All inaccessible.
The heat! We use a Nest home thermostat. Thank goodness it was a warm night.
Television! We stream all of our content. Um, no we don’t - not when there’s no internet.
Music! See above. Me and my kid have a few songs downloaded to our phones from Spotify but as it turns out, not nearly enough.
Home security! While the alarm was using cell backup, the Ring camera and such was offline.
The other thing that is somewhat unique to our home is that we have absolutely terrible cell coverage which meant using data was also pretty hard. So even using data was pretty tough.
Had this nightmare lasted longer, it would have genuinely created some legit problems. Yes, I do read actual books, and god forbid, my family could have … talked with each other. But man, if you’d told me just a few years ago how utterly disruptive an internet outage was, I might not quite have believed you.
Never leave me again, Internet.
Yeah eeks. Simpler times AMIRIGHT