Mother of God. Yesterday we lost our DSL connection. There have been times in the past when our connectivity went kaput but yesterday was a pretty good wake-up call to an alarming situation: I can’t get along well without my internet connection.

In the past I thought that I couldn’t get by without television and these days I only watch when there’s something really interesting (National Geographic’s  Fight Science) or if Angela wants to sit down and watch one of her shows off of TiVo. My replacement? Why, the internet, of course. I could busy myself reading really stupid stuff, shop for super cool things (I see that they have snazzy new stuff at Tiki Farm! Like that monkey wearing a fez cookie jar I saw on BoingBoing!), or downloading anime from Japan or shows like “TopGear” or the “IT Crowd” from England. Television? Bah, who needs you. I’m hip; I’m with it. I can get lost on YouTube for hours.

When I sat in front of my computer early yesterday everything was fine. I left for a few hours and then came back to check my mail and…nothing. No updates on projects I’ve been working on, no RSS feed updates, no spam offering to enlarge my penis or offer me a portion of a dictator’s fortune. I clicked the Send/Receive button and switched to a web browser to look stuff up. They both returned errors. That’s when I got that sickly feeling and started clicking every damn thing on my desktop that required accessing the web.

Poof. Nada.

I started to panic. I went through the usual unplugging and replugging of gear, restarting services, rebooting of boxes. Still nothing. I thought to tell Angela about this predicament so I fired up AIM. DOH! No internet connection. I had to use that telephony-talkie box thingy and actual speak with her. And so it went that I would have to call Verizon and get things straightened out. After an hour on the phone with them (How annoying is their customer support line?! Just give me a damn technician!) I found out that it was a problem on their end. Resolution? They’ll do some tests and send out a technician. Tomorrow. TOMORROW?!

And so it was that I was without access to the web and to my email accounts yesterday. It was horrible. I used my phone to try and keep up with my mail and then decided that it was pointless. I felt so…alone. Then a new feeling of anxiety hit me: I couldn’t email things that I’ve been working on for the past two days to clients! AAAAARGH!

Throughout the day I would sit in front of my computer, pressing the F5 button on an open browser or looking at netstat results that I set up to refresh every 10 minutes. From 7:30am until 10:30pm I had nothing. I spent the day saying things like “Oh, I’ll look that up online…DOH!” or “Let me check my email for an update on…DOH!”. It was horrible. Like my best friend just called me a fat, venereal diseased whore, slapped me in the face and abandoned me. I was so out of the loop – world events were happening without my knowledge and technology probably progressed light years further than where I had left off.

After watching the 12th Full Metal Alchemist dvd with Angela, I decided to give it one more try. Ping! IT WAS UP AND RUNNING! I COULD SEE WEB PAGES! MY EMAIL WAS DOWNLOADING!!

All 2876 messages.

No wonder I don’t watch tv that much anymore.