Three Stories (Part 1)

---

As I write this, Blogger has been down for 48 hours.

You wake up in the morning, blearily stagger downstairs for some breakfast, flick on the kettle...and instead of a cup of morning coffee you get a loud crack, the smell of burning, and resolutely unheated water.

It's annoying, it's inconvenient, it probably means a trip to the electrical shop to get a new kettle, but you don't sink to the floor, wailing and ripping out your hair.

Instead, you grumpily punch the TV remote - because you've got a television in your kitchen that you only use for watching the morning news and the evening news while waiting for the microwave to go ping and the kettle to boil.

On the news is a story about how the local roads you drive down most days are blocked with snow. Again, it's annoying and inconvenient. Your plans for the day - maybe the week - could just have been scuppered, but once again you don't have a nervous breakdown and you don't join a doomsday cult.

Then while drinking coffee made with water boiled in a saucepan and listening to the radio news, you check your email. Or you try to, but you keep getting a cryptic numbered message about 'connection timed out' or 'unable to connect with server'.

So what do you do? Shrug and go do something else? Make a mental note to try again later? No, you keep pressing the button, trying to download the overnight spam and facebook chatter.

You realise you feel...lost without your virtual connections. Cut off, alone, disconnected and trapped in a suddenly claustrophobic world. You keep clicking the mouse, thinking the failed connection must be some silly mistake about to be immediately rectified. For the next ten minutes you're stuck in a circuit of the same actions, like a robot stuck in a logic loop.

And besides the lost feeling, there's a kind of blustering anger. Because this kind of thing is just not good enough. You pay your ISP to keep you connected at all times, and obviously the technicians in the big shiny computer centre aren't doing their jobs because it's been, like, half an hour and they still haven't fixed whatever the problem is.

Yes, it's that combination of existential panic and ranting outrage. That mixture of emotions that doesn't come from the weather re-arranging your timetable, or a cheaply manufactured household implement breaking. It's the attitude reserved for some personal technology, and in particular personal computers.

It's 0800 13/05/11 as I type, and Blogger's messageboards are overflowing with threads like 'When will Blogger be back up & running?', 'Why has Blogger been disabled for 7+ hours today (5/12/2011)? This is unacceptably sh*tty service!' and 'WOW this LONG down time! Will Blogger be discontinued?'.

Shouting, threats, namecalling, and not a little paranoia. Some are posting to say if the outage lasts one more hour they'll never use Blogger's services ever again. Others are ranting that Blogger's technicians haven't posted an estimate of how long it'll take them to find and correct the problem - because everyone knows techies have precognitive superpowers.

* 'Why no further updates as to when service will be restored?'
* 'Is this all problem with Friday 13?'
* 'We Should Have Been Warned'
* 'Why do you refuse to give an ETA for restoration of Blogger service?'
* 'Being terrorist attacked? I'm losing my readers!'

This is the modern attitude to the internet and home computers, or rather to their failure. A combination of existential horror that something fundamental and unquestionable - our virtual selves - has suddenly been cut off, and outrage the situation hasn't been immediately remedied by the authorities. Panic, and affront that the universe has dared to do this to us.

If we can't make a phone call because our mobile phone is out of range, it's an irritation and maybe a serious practical problem, but it's not like a crisis of faith. If we can't post to twitter from the same device and for the same reason, it is a little like you're a young child with a normally dependable parent, suddenly left alone and without explanation in a big empty field.

We don't even expect our gods to be on call 24/7/365 - and we meekly accept when they don't answer our prayers. But even though we know intellectually that our technology is far from omniscient, omnipresent, reliable and obedient, we still expect more from little black boxes than the creator of the universe.

---