What’s life without internet connectivity?

We’ve all heard about those ‘experiments’ where people volunteer to replicate the lives of those living in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries — cooking over firewood, eating the kinds of food common in those days, and so on. These are controlled experiments, and after a few weeks or months, the human guinea pigs go back to their usual 21st century existence, often much relieved to get back to its comforts.

However, without actually volunteering to do so, we were thrown back to an earlier decade — the ‘internet-less’ decade of the early eighties. Our service providers unceremoniously cut our landline and internet connection due to no fault of ours, and in one move we were pushed into the Dark Ages!

Do you remember those good old days when only a lucky few owned a desktop computer (laptops were unheard of then), or when in offices only the favoured few had that magic box?

Words, which have become part of our collective consciousness, like Facebook, YouTube and Myspace, did not exist then. And of course, snail mail was still the usual mode of written communication over long distances.

Well, that’s exactly what we had to use in the last two weeks, except that it was doubly difficult as everyone else was 30 years ahead of us. It was like being stuck in a time warp.

Day one with no phone or internet saw me go through my early morning ritual of reaching for my iPad in a half-sleepy state to check my mail. What a rude awakening when it struck me that I was cut off from the internet!

Fidgeting around

The rest of the day was spent fidgeting around, both mentally and physically. I dearly missed the sound of those ‘pings’ when my inbox gets new mail, and, worse still, the sound of the phone ringing.

Fortunately I had my cellphone, so I was not totally cut off. But I was irritable and angsty, as I missed my daily dose of computerese.

After some time, however, things fell into place. For the rest of that period, I jumped out of bed, opened the balcony windows and looked out at a clear blue day, breathing in the fresh air. I went out of the house more often, visiting a friend here, going to places I would have otherwise been too lazy to drive to, or doing things I would never have done, like taking a mid-afternoon walk.

I’d dip back into the present by spending an hour mid-morning in a cafe with Wi-Fi, only to find to my consternation that nothing earth-shattering was happening.

There were the usual jokes and forwards and the occasional message from a friend, but nothing very important. My better half, once he came home, found his fingers too twitching so every evening saw us going to a Starbucks cafe to have a hot something — a chocolate or a coffee — and browse the while. We became regulars for the next two weeks, and were greeted with big smiles by the staff there.

But before I became too self-righteous and sanctimonious, the internet and the phone lines came back. And when that phone bell first rang after that two-week silence, it was the sweetest sound in the world.

Our enforced seclusion was over. Would I ever want to voluntarily go back to this internet-less and phoneless state? The answer is a resounding NO! No matter how much I love the sound of the birds and how relaxed I feel when I view fluffy white clouds sailing across the blue sky, I definitely prefer the world of my laptop and landline!

Padmini B. Sankar is a Dubai-based freelance writer.