By Circe -
After a great deal of angry yelling, my internets have returned. I'm sure my roommate thinks I'm some kind of hysterical psycho-bitch by now, but I've got the telecomms back, so I don't care anymore, do I? I don't think he grasps what happens when there is no internet in the apartment.

I'll just go down the list, shall I? With no net connection, I:

  • can't do any of my QA work. The position is entirely remote, entirely online, and bills hourly. This position pays most of my bills.
  • can't do any Mechanical Turk work, which is also entirely online, and pays per-piece.
  • can do a very limited amount of work for Circlet. Technically, all of my graphic design software is stored locally and duplicated across both platforms, but all of the resources I need to put together an ad campaign -- clean cover art, templates, the stylesheet, press/blurbs, the list of ISBNs, the list of press sites, the various social media, the actual books -- is stored on GDrive, Dropbox, and the Circlet webservers.
  • can't send or answer emails reliably. The Kindle will pull up GMail. Sometimes. Sending fails about 90% of the time, and it drops again whenever Google decides to make the interface prettier somehow.
  • can't book any shoots or shows, as that all comes through Facebook or my online rep service.
  • can't continue the search for the roommate, which is running mainly on cragislist and via email.
  • can't check my bank balance without spending subway fare or hiking about two miles into Cambridge to the closest proper ATM.
  • can't contact the myriad people for whom I have a Gmail address or a Facebook feed, but not a phone number.
  • can't use Google to find out if anyone has useful phone numbers (like bank-by-phone) that I haven't already been explicitly given.
  • can't find out what hours the bank and/or library branch is open without hiking down there.
  • can't check the online bus schedule or make sure the damn thing is stopping at the corner despite all the construction equipment in the way.
  • can't get to any of my podcasts.
  • can't get to any of my blogs.
  • can't get to any of my message boards.
  • can't get to my music stash on Google Play.
  • can't get to streaming TV on Netflix/YouTube.
  • can't get to Google Translate, Wordreference.com, or the WWWJDIC.
  • can't check the desk schedule for the dance studio.
  • can't request holds or see if BPL has any of my holds in before I go all the way down there.
  • can't check Google Calendar to see where the hell I'm supposed to be physically located at any given time.
  • can't get the weather forecast. Seriously. I don't own a radio, and the cable comes through the same service as the internet.
  • can't get to or from Twitter, aside from @mentions thrown directly at me, and the three whole people whose tweets I have bounced to my phone.
  • can't get to Google Talk on any of my accounts.
  • can't email things or bounce "read later" items to my Kindle.
  • can't tag, adjust the time, preview, or queue anything on my blog -- although I can (kinda sorta) post things to it if I'm willing to smash three pages of text in with my thumbs on the Kindle keyboard.
  • can't access my T-Mobile account to turn on the 3G data plan in an act of utter desperation.
...and other relatively minor annoyances, like not being able to get Windows Updates to shut it, as it's whining that it can't call home for a patch of some sort, or having to remember to carry thumbdrives around for file transfers.

In terms of how this affects my daily living, it was rather akin to waking up one morning to discover someone had somehow gotten my ability to talk shut off through their irresponsible behavior, and then, despite repeated angry complaints, spent the better part of a week being kind of vague and lackadaisical about fucking fixing it. If it vanished completely and forever, I could certainly learn to get along without it, but under the circumstances I mainly spent my time as a mute fantasizing about getting my voice back so I could shout at him until he lost the hearing in at least one of his favorite ears.

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