Sunday, 21st January, 2007

Scrub That

online network

Picture the scene: Siobhan has just spent the majority of her Sunday morning drinking coffee, smoking fags, writing a great big rambling post about how she's pissed off in general at the moment — things about houses, phonelines, internets, work etc. — and she's now pacing around the downstairs mutering to herself about Second Life things in an attempt to divert her annoyance away from being offline.

Then the phone rings.

Fuck. Me.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting that — they'd said they wouldn't fix it until Friday — but the main reason it scared the crap out of me was because I had a friend's phone plugged in (to test) and the ringtone was unfamiliar.

"Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! Oooh!" I squeed, as I ran upstairs to reboot everything, thinking my little enforced hiatus was over — but still no internet

...

"Patience Siobhan, at least you know it wasn't your fault..."

...

You know, it's really weird this. We joke at work about how integral being online is to me, but I really just take it for granted. One of the first things I do each morning is check my mail and RSS feeds — I usually plonk myself down on the sofa with a coffee, a fag, and my laptop within minutes of hauling my arse out of bed — and this morning, I was floudering a little.

I was sat here, staring at the laptop, thinking "Um."

I don't, personally, think there's anything wrong with how much my life seems to revolve around being online — it's just what I do, you know?

I guess some people seem to think it's "unhealthy", or something — but I feel it's just like anything else that people spend their time doing. Like if you were into fishing, but there was a big drought or something. Or if you were into films, but there's fuck-all on at the cinema.

Or if — heaven forbid — you quite liked Wearing Ladies' Things™, but people didn't seem to think that was "appropriate".

I guess the only difference (maybe) is that almost everything I'm 'into' relies on a tiny clump of little copper wires that comes into my house, and when something goes wrong with that fragile little thread of connectivity with the rest of the world, I'm a bit fucked.

I'm sure there's an appropriate phrase here — something to do with "eggs" and "baskets"

For The Record

downtime

I occasionally have little moments of downtime. It's almost a running joke I presume — I get texts and IMs telling me Erin is down every once in a while, and counteract with "I must teach the cats to reboot the router". Or something. This has, though, been quite an extended period of offlineness for me (she said, presuming she's going to be back up sometime soon) ... but the longest I was down for was between the 26th of November, 2003 and the 29th of January, 2004¹

You can see how twitchy and grumpy I am after a few days of this — imagine what I was like after two months

¹ I know. There are posts inbetween those dates. After a while I realised I could just keep rabbiting on, so I did — even though no-one was reading. I was talking to a friend last night about all of this, and he said "Now you know how the rest of us feel, no-one reads our blogs"