Jeffrey “Biff” Bergeron nailed it in his recent column about smart phones insidiously insinuating themselves into our daily lives. Underlying that assertion is an older and equally pervasive dependence on another technology that folks don’t miss until its high-tech well runs dry. It’s hard to believe that the internet as most of us know it has only been around for some 30 years, given how pervasive its usage is in our daily lives. It’s been quietly supporting humanity culturally and logistically since the late 20th century and continues to be a critical underpinning in our lives today. This became profoundly apparent in the Jones household recently when our service went down and we were informed we wouldn’t be able to get someone out to fix it for three days. Three days?!

How quickly the many ways that we’d become dependent on connectivity surfaced, starting with entertainment. We cut the cable a while ago and haven’t looked back thanks to streaming services. We can get local Denver channels the old-fashioned way — over the air via antenna — but only really use that to watch newscasts and Broncos games. So now, what, no more HBO Max, Netflix, Amazon Video? No more YouTube? Oh, the horror! Not even our iPads can help us with that since they use the internet for, well, everything. Including the games on them, most of which are also apparently reliant on the internet to operate. Fortunately, the ebook I’d downloaded before the outage is still working.  

We’ve also come to realize how integrated internet connectivity has become with household upkeep. Need to run the sprinklers a little extra due to the hot weather, or check the security cameras to see who’s at the door or what critter might have knocked over the trash cans last night? No dice. Want to turn off the AC thanks to a cold front pushing through for a couple of days? Damn! Gonna have to get off the couch to do that.

Thankfully, we’ve not taken things as far as some appliance manufacturers would have us do. For instance, we didn’t connect our oven, refrigerator or washer and dryer to the internet — though with the latest models of these, we could have. Given the human intervention these devices require, it didn’t make much sense to me to connect them to the cloud. And since we haven’t a robot (yet) to load the dishwasher and the Roomba hasn’t learned how to sort whites and darks, I guess there are household chores that we’ll continue to do the same way generations past have done. 

Now, I can hear many of you saying, “Come on Jones, you Luddite, you ever heard of cellular hot spot technology? You know, flip a switch on the smart phone and use that as your Wi-Fi router?” Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, so yes, I do know about that. But it just so happened that the internet outage at our house coincided with us switching cellular providers for the family smartphones. 

But no big deal, right? Just cut over to the new phones and use the hot spot on them for connectivity. Only problem with that is you need internet access to activate the new phones. But wait, until you activate the new phones, you can still access the internet from the old phones, right? Well, for reasons that I couldn’t quite figure out, due to ignorance or plain impatience, some websites would come up on the old phones’ browsers while we were in the house, but others wouldn’t. For instance, we could Google the phone number to our internet provider so we could report the outage, but couldn’t navigate to their website to login to our account, receiving the dreaded 404 error when we tried. We ended up having to go to our daughter’s house to use her internet to access the site we needed to activate the new phones. 

Once that was done, we could then use those new phones as hot spots at our house. Of course, we’re not gonna stream anything there, because unlimited data on cellular accounts only means unlimited till you reach some random threshold that once having passed decreases your internet throughput to hamster on a wheel speeds. And a mobile hot spot can’t provide the same throughput as a fiber Wi-Fi router. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as waiting minutes for a simple website to load and then when you click on the submit button for the form that you had to fill out there’s no response to that click. Invariably, you then click that button again, only to get an error because, it turns out, that second click actually was on a Decline button that appeared, belatedly, where the submit button had been previously. Argh!

Three days without connectivity may seem like a blessing to many whose jobs or daily lives require immersion in the cloud. But once the internet rug has been pulled out from underneath you, it can quickly become a perfect storm of clashing disconnects you’ll wish you hadn’t wished for. 

Tony Jones' column "Everything in Moderation" publishes biweekly on Thursdays in the Summit Daily News. Jones is a veteran of the IT industry and has worked in the public and private sectors. He lives part-time in Summit County and Denver. Contact him at eimsummit@gmail.com.