Ode to Technology

I'm back!

After one (long) week without the internet, we now return to our regularly-scheduled (almost) daily blogging.  Whew.  It was a long week.  At one point toward the end, I said to a couple of friends, "You know, it's not so bad not to have the internet.  We just have a lot of questions that can't be answered."  It was a joke, but, as with all jokes, there was a grain of truth in it.

In that week, my husband and I learned a lot about ourselves:
* My husband discovered that he is addicted to an online game.  He can't let anyone pass him, so he had to check in every day, even to the point of using all of the data on his iPhone plan.
* We're even more grateful for our iPhones, or we would have been completely cut off.  Which would have been awful.
* Apparently I can't research anything without Wikipedia and IMDB.
* I also can't pay my bills or check my bank account without the internet.
* If I couldn't text, I'm also not sure I could have stayed connected with any of my friends.
* Strangely, it is extremely difficult to communicate with my new internet provider without some access to the internet.  Which I didn't yet have.

That really got me thinking.  How did two people who grew up without email addresses, internet research, or online banking and had to play board games or Minesweeper, wait for a bank statement to arrive in the mail, and dial 5-3-0-S-H-O-W for movie times end up here?  And why can't we fend for ourselves?  I had two people offer to let me go to their house to use their internet, and I very nearly went to ask my neighbor for his password so I could use his wireless.  It's rather like getting a calculator or cash register and then having to think hard about how to make change for a dollar.

Really, though, we're a society that depends on technology for almost everything.  The scale that weighs me in at the gym uses a computer.  The van that I drive around cannot function if the computer goes down.  I rely on weather.com and yp.com to answer questions that a phone call, check of the daily (HA!) newspaper, or flip through the phone book used to answer.  I track my weight gain and loss with my computer, work from home via remote access to my desk computer, arrange babysitters and double dates via email and texting, check restaurant menus and movie times on my phone . . . the list goes on and on. 

Technology can be such a gift.  And when it's taken away, it's hard to remember how life used to be before we had it.  In fact, when I look at my goals, there is really only one that I can accomplish without technology: daily Bible reading.  And it's the only one I'm going to meet this month.