Internet Dependence

I never realized how much of my time I was frittering away on the Internet until my cable got taken out by high winds this past Tuesday. All of a sudden I found I was getting around to all those little projects I'd been putting off for weeks because I could never quite find the time for them.

Unfortunately, that advantage didn't really outweigh the disadvantage of being unable to run to the computer and take care of all those little things that pop up a dozen times over the course of a day. E-mails piled up in my inbox, and I could only attend to the urgent ones in half-hour blocks on the public computers at the library. Worse than that, in the final week before the election, I was cut off from realclearpolitics.com, my source of the up-to-the minute polling data that I required in order to obsess over minute day-to-day changes in the electoral map. And, in what may be the highest irony of all, I had to pay my cable bill by mail, rather than using my online bill payment service, because I was afraid that I wouldn't get it paid on time if I had to wait for the company to get the cable fixed.

So I am forced at last to acknowledge that, without reliable Internet access, my life is not complete. For better or worse, I am now a cyborg.