Howdy, WG2E folks!
It’s been an interesting few days here on the ol’ cattle farm.
On the bright side, our cows have started calving. Of course, that means cute little baby calves running around the pasture (always a good thing).
As lovely as it is to look out the window or walk amongst our bovine pals, living out in the boonies can have some less than stellar side effects now and again. Namely, our occasonally limited ability to access the interwebs.
For the most part, we have pretty good access out here. But for the last week, we went from 90% of the time online to 90% of the time offline. After many phone calls, I finally got a technician to come out Tuesday afternoon. He made an adjustment, telling me that it must have been a strong gust of wind that had made our connection so tenuous.
This newbie author had much internal rejoicing about having his lifeline restored. The technician left not long after the snow started falling in earnest. As I was feeding hay to the cows, I watched as a blanket of wet snow covered everything in sight. It occurred to me that our interwebs, so recently reestablished, might be smothered by the snow. We’re getting dumped on.
It’s amazing how much we’ve come to rely upon our connection to the WWW. I know that I have.
As I began writing this post, I still had a connection. Since then, the snow has covered our ISPs apparatus outside and killed our connection. It is now after 3:00 AM. I’m preparing to go outside to climb part way up our old TV tower to which our internet thingy is attached and rock it back and forth to shake off the snow. If you are reading this, then I was successful in my endeavor.
If not. Well… Hopefully they’ll find me when the snow melts.
How about you, WG2E peeps? How much do you rely upon your connection to the internet? Have you been unable to get online when you really needed to? I know most of you don’t live in the boonies, but I had to ask. How much did it suck…or not?
Sometimes it is great not to have internet if I have a load of writing to do (which seems alike always) then I do not have the distraction of checking mail or going off an o rabbit trail of Google research etc. On the other hand, longer than a day or two without internet makes me feel cut off from the world:)
I’m replying to this comment for the second time (let the record show). I’ll say (again) that it can be a good thing to be disconnected for a little while from our beloved interwebs. But, damn, there comes a point when you just want to be able to communicate with your fellow webians. Did I just make up a word? Damn.
I try to turn off as many distractions as possible when working, but I also perform detail research and use a number of reference sites as I go. If my access is down, the odds are that I will be dead in the water before long.
I agree with you, Dale.
The internet can be a distraction, but it can also be a lifeline for us out here in the boonies. When it’s not there and you are relying on it, things can get a little dicy.
I truly can’t imagine life without high-speed internet access for any extended period of time. All of my connections to friends and family, much of my research, and even my ability to follow major storms (a huge thing here in Kansas once tornado season is underway) depends on internet access. We dumped cable and satellite television a long time ago in favor of Netflix and Hulu, too.
We have some contact with the world thanks to cell phone internet access, but in some parts of our county, even that won’t work. We actually decided AGAINST renting a particular house when we were looking a few years ago because, while we liked its location in the country, high-speed internet access wasn’t available for a reasonable cost. I didn’t realize until that moment just how important internet access is to the way we live.
And by the way, I adore baby cows. They are so stinkin’ cute.
I’m in total agreement with y0u.
Being without interweb access can really, as they say here, put a hitch in yer giddyup.
I also live in the boonies (with horses, donkeys, and chickens instead of cattle), but thankfully my I-net connection is over the 90% stable threshhold. When it does go out, like it did for a while yesterday morning, I definitely get twitchy. Not only is it my connection to my friends when I’m isolated in my writer cave (which is pretty much all the times since I live in the boonies and it’s a long drive to anywhere from here), but when I’m copyediting for others, I depend on some of the online resources such as the USPTO Trademark database and online specialty dictionaries.
It’s hard to even remember what life was like before the Interwebs.
Hi, Vickie!
You’re right. Reading your comment, I couldn’t help but think what my farmer grandfather would have made of my post. It would have been completely incomprehensible to him.
If it’s hard for us to imagine life before the internet, imagine what it would be like for someone from 50 years ago to comprehend what we do online every day. Damn…
We were offline for three days during Irene, and about that for Sandy, too. Our house is at the end of a long line so it is dependent on a booster, which is dependent upon electricity. During Sandy, our cable service figured that out and put generators on all their boosters. Since we have a generator for our house, we were up and running after that. My book contains a lot of technical detail, so I need at least occasional connectivity. I couldn’t use my smartphone as a hotspot, or even backup search engine, because we live in so isolated an area that cell service is marginal at best; during the storms it too disappeared for several hours. I’m never going to depend on the cloud for any of my apps or immediate storage!
Woah.
I’m feeling you.
I have fairly 24/7 access to the internet, because of my location etc, which is great. However, when we were working on St Mall’s, I know we had several large set backs because of Mark’s internet going down, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time. Last summer, I genuinely emailed Charley to ask if she’d heard for him and did she think he was dead because he had completely disappeared. Fortunately, it was only the internet causing trouble.
Most of my friends are online, if I’m honest. The thought of losing them for long periods of time (i.e. longer than, um, a day?) is horrific! I have some of their numbers, if they’re in the country, so I can contact them from my phone, but the internet is a lifeline for me.
I feel you.
Preach it.
Having just entered my sixth decade, I marvel at where our technology has taken us during my lifetime. With some effort, I can remember as a child, my parents speaking on a phone that had a crank on the side of it you used to dial your neighbors with. I believe our ring was two shorts and a long. Makes you wonder what we’ll be doing in another sixty years(or six for that matter).
Yes, I would miss it greatly and I can say that access to all this technology is what gave me the opportunity to be a self-published author and for that I will be forever grateful, especially to people who are so sharing on this site.
For David, a fellow cattle producer and writer – We’ve gone to a fall calving program, to heck with the bad spring storms. I plan on being in the farmhouse, writing my next book during the next ice storm.
Thanks, Bill.
Thanks for sharing that bit about your ring being two shorts and a long. I hope you, as a writer, will (or have) included that little bit of Americana in a story. That’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t be lost. And I don’t mean just the idea of individual rings, but the passing on of the particular ring that you remember to your family or history minded folks in your town or future decedents from people in your town.
Sorry. Sometimes I can’t help myself. I just go full on nerd.
Glad you made it back inside, David. About 2 years ago a storm blew out my modem on New Years Day and it took 5 days to get a new one. (Happy New Year) But boy, did I get some major writing done that week! Every once in awhile…no, I can’t say it. Just can’t.
Thanks, Stacey.
I’m really glad I made it back inside, too. Heh.
Lose my Internet for a day or two?
No problem.
I’d just probably slit my wrists.
Figuratively speaking, of course:)
I’d probably just get drunk.
Hi, Joe.
It’s good to know that you would approach the situation with such a level head.
Oh, my dear. I rely TOO much on my interwebs connection.
You see, I’m retired — one year now. And I miss the daily contact with…uh…people. I LOVE my dear husband, our dog and various cats (indoor and outdoor) but I miss the diversity of the workplace — not the work. I get that online, on my darling interwebs, the blogs, Facebook, Twitter, emails, etc.
My step daughter has interweb issues at times. She’s also out in the boonies — with sheep and cattle. So when we visit, I can sometimes suffer withdrawal.
When I’m out an about….well, let’s just say: What did I DO before the iphone?
So you see, dear newbie author, there are some of us old people who are hooked, too.
Mitzi
Thanks, Mitzi.
It’s nice to know that you can relate.
We’re lucky in Celebration, because all our service lines are underground. And it hardly ever snows in Florida. But we have had the main junction box go out twice since we lived here–once an old box caught on fire and the second time an inebriated driver plowed into it. We’re lucky that we haven’t had any wide area blackouts in Central Florida, even during some of the worst hurricane seasons, so we can always find someplace to go.
The second time the junction box went out, I was on a conference call for a systems outage in Chicago. I grabbed my laptop, and along with it looked like about twenty other Celebration residents headed to the Starbucks across the highway, that’s on a different part of the grid. Don’t know what we’d do without Starbucks. If it’s just us, we have a few restaurants in town that have wireless, so head up there, but when the whole town is out there’s always the Starbucks across the highway.
I’d be totally lost without the Internet, but I can work locally for a while, just not forever.
Well said, SK.
Good to know that SB is able to save the day when all else fails. The only drawback is all the caffeine. Heh.
I travel frequently, and am often in places where internet access is hard to come by. Most recently, I was in Cuba for 10 days, at a time when two of my books were going through the publishing process. (VERY BAD PLANNING on my part….) Cuba uses dial-up, purchased (?pirated?) via an undersea cable to Venezuela. Upper end hotels have internet connection for a steep price, but one must use their computers which are highly controlled ( read: no clickable links work). 10 days seemed like a lifetime….
Good to hear from you, Dianne!
Damn. That sounds like just the sort of thing that would happen to me.
It’s nice to know that my grey cloud is not exclusive. Heh. Hope you were able to overcome.
We live in sunny Texas, with wide open spaces and lots of techies. Never had a problem. Plus, when my hubby and I travel, we use a hotspot. Tip – never leave it on when you’re not using it. Got a bill for $80 when it happily downloaded a bunch of junk!
Good luck with your weather. Snow can be a bummer, but it’s pretty to look at!
I was just talking to my friend about this the other day. I don’t know what I’d do without my Internet connection, but I found out about five years ago when there was a fire at my condo. Then I had to use the computers at the library. It was hard for me. And hard to get much writing done without a computer.