Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 3

What Is Your Internet Half-Life?

"Oh, We Hope to Have the Internet Back Next Week"

Early this year several of my colleagues and I were slated to give a presentation at a community college a couple of counties away. When we arrived at the site, I realized I needed to use the Net as part of my presentation. No problem, I thought – they'll surely have Internet access. Well, in fact, they did, but the PC in the conference room wasn't connected. No problem, I thought, I'll download a couple of Powerpoint files from my PC at home. Since it's connected via a cable modem, I can access files from any site on the Internet any time I need to (assuming the power is up back home!).

So I asked around for an Internet-connected PC. Someone was kind enough to show me to one. Alas, it seemed not to be connected, either. A secretary saw me having trouble as I started doing Pings and Traceroutes; she suggested "I think you need to type ‘http://' before the ‘www.netfact.com.'" I was probably less polite than I should've been in response.

Further inquiries revealed that the Internet connection for the entire community college was down. "When do you expect to have Internet access back?" I asked, expecting the answer would be in a few minutes or at worst a few hours. "Oh, probably by next Tuesday" came the reply. But this was Friday! Surely the loss of Internet access for the entire campus was a 5 bell alarm event, and surely the computer staff would do whatever was necessary to get things online immediately?

Nope. Next Tuesday.

Besides the obvious point that your author is an idiot, who needs to learn to forego live Powerpoint in favor of acetate transparencies, these incidents bring up a basic observation: for some people and some institutions, the Internet has become woven into daily activities. For others, the Internet is still a relatively unimportant part of the business of the day.