Some reflections on 9 days recently without TV, telephone, mobile phone or Internet service as a consequence of a major storm and a long period of torrential rain which washed out roads, bridges, houses, cables and communications.
TV
Without it we didn’t see a reporter on the evening news standing up to their knees in flood water struggling to be heard above the howling wind while telling us about the storm we were actually experiencing for ourselves. Their challenge is to do this while not showing an adjacent competing TV channel reporter doing the same thing.
Now that the TV service has been restored you realise you have become accustomed to seeing large groups of heavily armed militarised police SWAT squads turning up too late at another mass shooting.
Similarly many of the evening TV series seem to be about murder and violence and feature good looking people with clipped on police badges with guns in their hands.
On one channel rhythmically challenged people try dancing, on another insecure people are seemingly convinced their standing in the cosmos depends on another persons opinion about a cake they just made.
My life was not significantly poorer for a week without the TV programs available hereabout.
The videos made by people driving their cars through the recent California fires not knowing if they were heading out or into the fires were compelling. Though on reflection we only saw the videos of those that made the correct guess.
I did note that in both the floods here and the fires in California a significant number of the dead were old people.
Telephone “Fixe”
Aurelia is one of the few (older) people I know who still who still use it to call friends.
Mobile Phone.
The mobile phone service only works if you stand outside in the cold on a far end of my terrace so it gets little use anyway.
Internet.
I now realise to what extent I am becoming increasingly reliant on it.
I use it for weekly video calls to see and talk with my children and grandchildren and with friends in the same time zone. I use it to stay in touch with friends around the world via email.
It was reconfirmed for me that to make a major purchase like an airline ticket you need the internet, you now also depend on it for all banking actvities.
Conclusion.
After the first few days of the outage I visited the Orange (previously France Telecom) shop three times and on each occasion waited in a long line hoping for an estimate when they thought my service might be restored. The first two times their approach was “yes it is a terrible inconvenience but be patient we are working hard to restore service.”
The third time their approach had shifted markedly. When I finally got the head of the queue this time the response of the young employee filtering customers at the door was “You know that people have died, that survivors are living in school gymnasiums and village halls, they have lost their homes.There are 32,000 people without service, we are working hard to restore it but there is no point in you coming into the shop, we cannot help and we have no additional information for you.”
When I tried to respond to this there were murmurs from the people behind me waiting impatiently in line to buy their new smart phone, and when I turned around I heard they were saying the same things as the Orange customer service agent, in the third person. I thanked him politely, said au revoir mesdames, messieurs to those in the line and still blessed with connectivity, exited the shop and went home and waited patiently. Thinking positively about the time I was saving not routinely resetting my passwords.
Give it a try, turn off your wifi for a week and send me a note, if you were ready for the challenge, on how it impacted your life.
Be well do good work and please keep in touch.
John
It is no sign of health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti