I have been a month with out internet. This is my account of how my family and I survived the long deep dark nights and weekends.
Tuesday 25th May, Day One, week one. Internet went down, apparently our contract had ended and without so much as a nod in our direction our friendly service provider ceased to provide service. Cue (or should I say queue) many phonecalls and hanging on the telephone for hours on end listening to terrible music...much later, an operater eventually promised us full restoration by end of week one.
End of week one arrives. No sign of the three green lights, hence many more hours listening to music I don’t like. It soon surfaced that apparently, it was too late to restore our services, it had alreadly been taken off the system. No amount of talking was getting us anywhere. Husband angrily declares to take our business elsewhere.
At this point kids are waxen and pale and climbing the walls.
What is happening in Club Penguin? How can we see missed episode of Dr Who?
I myself am having hot flushes hoping nobody's tagged unflattering pictures of me in Facebook?
Think of all the lost jobs and missed opportunities and still there seemed to be no light at the end of our modem.
Friends and family really reached out in these darkest hours and let me check my email. The library too became a favourite haunt but as my membership had ran out I used the kids computer IDs.
There.. I was to be found hovering above the little people in the little peoples section checking email to my hearts content. One of the kindly librarians once led me to the big people section and signed me on as a guest. Yippee! no parental control on computor! I could check FB, Twitter and go surfing, where ever I wanted.
Week Two, Husband priced around all internet providers and found the one we were with was best value. Decided we would go back, but not without a fight, well at least if I could have got speaking to someone that had any power to fight with. Many calls later and finally secured a name and number of a real person.
Week Three.
Between stolen visits to library on pretence of educationally expanding my childrens' minds, I start leaving messages on real persons answering machine. In the nicest possible way I explained the situation and apologised for leaving so many messages, I told the real persons answering machine I really didn’t want to be be clogging up his answering maching inbox but I really needed to speak to real person. I rang and told the real persons machine this every couple of hours.
Finally, real person has had enough, he phones back and apologises for knocking us off system, promises to restore all with no connection fee as we shouldn’t have been disconnected in first place, but we’d have to start from scratch as if we were just taking out new contract, this would take some time. It was not a matter of switching on a switch apparently. So we knuckled down for the longhaul.
To be fair the real person also phoned back every couple of days to update us on our postion in line, to let us know he was thinking about us, to give counsel and support to us, to talk us through cold turkey. He also credited account £20 for inconveinence. The only thing he didn’t do was check my email and de-tag my FB photos.
Week 4
At this pont Kids have gone from waxy pale to a healthy freckly brown and are scaling the climbing frames almost daily in the park. I have stopped wasting hours looking at sites that tell me how to make pretty things and have started making pretty things. I’ve started running, husbands started cycling again! The world outside is wide. Do we really want to be caught back in a web?
Friday May 26th. The Internets back on!! After inital flurry of excitement has died down, and everyones had their fix, (some puffles did run to the wild in Club Penguin, no horrendous photos appeared on facebook and only one last minute job was lost), only then I start to hark back on the long dark days with nostalgia. Maybe they weren’t so dark. You know it was good not to be connected in one way, we finally did things that we were always putting off doing. The kids have been outside more, the weather was actually sunny and the days long.
So it is with some intrepidation that I dip my toes back in to the virtual world. But I think this time I will restrict myself, and If I find I’m on Facebook or looking at the lovely things in Etsy I will stand up switch it off, go outside and stand on terra firma once more, unless its raining then I’ll go back in switch it on an look at nice exotic locations whilst dreaming of getting away from it all, and who knows maybe even take up some real surfing.
