The Great Digital Disconnect

My stepdaughter owns a short-term rental in Bryson City, NC. The unique feature of this unit is that there is no internet, and no decent cell phone signal. She named the house "The Digital Disconnet" and it stays rented all the time. Apparently our digital world, with its 24/7 connection to the universe, is so stressful that a little time away from it all is the mark of a true vacation. I often wondered what it would be like with no digital connection to the outside world. I found out last weekend.

A week or so ago a crew was out in our neighborhood, with their spray cans of paint, marking the locations of electrical, water, gas, telephone, and cable lines. (In Madison, these are all underground.) I knew that some digging was in our future, but I didn't know exactly where. The Thursday before last weekend, I received a text message from Spectrum, our internet provider, informing me that we were in an area of internet outage, but that they were working on it. As I drove into the neighboood, I saw the problem: Georgia Power looked at all those lawn markings, pointed to the one that said "George's Internet," and decided to dig there. The Spectrum truck was in our driveway, but there was precious little he could do until a crew came out to repair the internet cable, which was cut, by the way, in four places. Georgia Power wanted to make sure that I would be without internet.

While waiting on the repair crew, which came Friday, the tech decided to check my modem and the connections down at the junction box in front of my house. The took some cabling apart, looked at it, muttered about how dirty it was, and left it disconnected.

All this was inconvenient, as I had a Zoom meeting with parents scheduled for that evening. I ended up doing the meeting in the cab of my truck, parked within wifi range of the Quality Inn at Madison.

And so passed Thursday night, the evening of the first day without internet.

On my trip home Friday I received a text from Spectrum, telling me the repairs were completed. So I was a bit peeved when I arrived home to find that I had no internet. Yes, the cable had been replaced. No, the tech had not returned to reconnect the cables down at the junction box. I called, and the folks at Spectrum told me I could get an appointment at 5:00 PM. The problem: it would be 5:00 PM MONDAY. I burned up the rest of my high speed cellular data by watching a television show on my phone. At that point we were without both internet and high speed data. The data we did have was at a much reduced speed. It reminded me of the old AT&T EDGE network days.

And so passed Friday night, the evening of the second day without internet.

Saturday we had a festival to work. If you have never attended the Bostwick (GA) Cotton Gin Festival, you do not know what you are missing. My favorite columnist, Salena Zito, recently wrote a column about small towns and their festivals. This festival could have been featured in her column. I love small-town American, and that means I love the little crossroad of Bostwick. Once we had a couple of dozen cotton gins in our county. As far as I know, the one is Bostwick is the only remaining operational gin in Morgan County. It is fascinating to see it run.

We used our credit card reader and app to sell products at the festival. Even on reduced speed, we were able to accept the credit cards offered to us. We returned home, and watched a film noir that I had previously recorded: Touch of Evil, a 1958 Orson Wells thriller. The big inconvenience was not being able to ask Alexa what the weather would be like on Sunday. That and having to drive to the Pilot gasoline station to tap into their internet in order to upload the most recent blog posting.

And so passed Saturday night, the evening of the third day without internet.

On Sunday, the lack of internet became a problem. We are working on a project, and we needed to be able to both upload and download documents. This required two trips down to the interstate: we used the Dunkin' wifi in the morning, then the Pilot wifi in the afternoon. By evening, we were exhausted, but reasonably happy. We have a couple of items to put together to finish the project, but that will have to wait for another day. The dog needed a bath, and that took precedence. We had dinner. We read. We went to bed early.

And so passed Sunday night, the evening of the fourth day without internet.

Monday morning, well before sun-up, I was at school, and received a text message from Spectrum telling me that my internet had been restored, and that I should press "3" in order to cancel the scheduled Monday afternoon visit by my local repair tech. Not having fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I politely declined to cancel the service call, which was a good thing. When I arrived home, I was still without internet, but my friendly repair tech showed up on time, and an hour or so later, I was back in business. It turns out that the Friday afternoon technician simply failed to reconnect some cables at the junction box in the yard. Had he done so, I would not have gone the weekend without my digital connection to the outside world. The tech checked everything: the junction box, the box on the wall of the house, the connections inside the house. He did a great job. I wish he had visited me on Friday.

I celebrated by watching an episode of “My Life Is Murder” and an episode of “The Americans”. I further celebrated with a dinner of Whoppers (2), Coca-Cola, and vanilla bean ice cream. As you can see, Kathy was out of town.

Thus ended Monday night, the evening of the fifth day without internet.

I've had my digital vacation. The most refreshing part of this vacation was its end.