I recently did a little research into the plausibility of switching over from dial-up to high speed internet. While going online on the back of a turtle may be fine for the turtle, it is really putting a crimp in my patience. I have heard the rumors involving high speed internet, how you have instant access to every web site, to email and the works, and you can integrate more than one computer to it while still leaving the home phone available for other calls. It almost sounds too good to be true, and I guess in a way, it is….the Achilles heel of the whole concept is unavailability if you happen to live out in the sticks. By the way, “sticks” appears to be defined as, “anyone living two inches outside the city limits.”
Guess where I live if you can….yeah, it's on a major highway to be sure, but apparently just outside the city limits is the “land that time forgot”, sort of like Mackinac Island. Out here there is no high speed internet, no cable, no nothing but dial-up, satellite, and hundreds of people throwing up their hands in aggravation because it takes ten minutes to go online and another ten to open your email. If you're anything like me, you don't have forever and a year to spend online, so you have to squeeze in your internet time while you can. This is not conducive to operating any kind of a home business unless your business happens to involve avoiding work.
Ironically, however, it appears that the people with high speed and satellite internet, are the ones who spend most of their day online, while the rest of us spend a little bit of time here and there, trying to do necessary stuff online while simultaneously attempting to avoid missed calls. Personally, I don't do a lot of web surfing because who has the time for it? I go to the sites I'm already familiar with, and leave the rest to the informed of the world. My favorites list is my best friend because it enables me to log on to a site faster, without having to go to all the trouble of typing in the site's address. Sometimes the favorites list will turn on me however, and will do its best to hide my sites from me. When I find myself scrolling for ten minutes I discover just how truly spoiled I really am, and then I end up typing in the address by hand anyway. (Is there another way to type?)
Email by dial-up is a challenge even on the best day. You hit your little web mail icon and then sit and grow old while the computer files its fingernails and sorts through its data files to try and determine just exactly what it is that you want it to do. Then, when it figures it out, you still have to type in your info, unless it is saved in the computer's memory, (which mine is not) and then wait for eternity to arrive while the computer hums away patiently trying to unearth the real you from all of its other junk, only to finally tell you that you gave it the wrong password, or wrong address. Computers love to do this because they are bored to tears, yet are incapable of crying. My computer is, anyway, bored, I mean. The thing has an incredibly powerful brain in it, and the most challenging thing I ask it to do is sit there and correct my typos. It wants revenge, darn it, and that's that.
High speed internet would give me the benefit of knowing that I gave the wrong password that much faster, and I can type it wrong over and over again, with the full knowledge that if I ever get around to doing it correctly, I will access my email sometime this year. As painful as it sounds, this would still be faster than dial-up. But for the time being, the dial-up turtle is still trudging along with me on its shell, at least until the year 2000 finally gets out here to the sticks. For some of you it has already arrived, I realize, but for us country folks, time is creeping along just as quickly as the internet on a good day.
So, while I am waiting around for the twenty-first century to meander out my way, I will continue to surf the web on little, bitty waves, and hopefully, learn a little something about patience in the process. Of course, I already know a little something about patience, having learned about it while waiting for people to answer my emails. It sometimes seems like everybody else on the planet is busier than myself, though I know that is not the case, and they are apparently too busy to answer email, yet they do not appear to be too busy to read that same email. Hmmm, correct me if I'm wrong, but if someone has enough time to read an email, certainly they also have enough time to answer it.
I have learned that it is never a good idea to ask a crucial question via email, if I need an answer right away. A phone call is faster, or at least it would be, if the person I am calling is not still online reading email. Of course, my patience level is stymied very quickly by people who do answer my email, but with a one word response. For example: “okay.” When I get an email consisting of a one word reply, I then have to go back and review my original message that I sent to that person, just to figure out what in the heck it is that they are okaying. This leads me to the natural question, “when people sell someone else's email address to spammers, are they doing it out of spite?”
I can see it now, “Heh, heh, heh, Julie doesn't have time to talk to me, so let's see how much time she has when she starts getting six hundred spam emails every day!” Oh yeah, the potential to do wrong is very strong. I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere is getting all kinds of spam today because they ignored the wrong person too many times. Of course some of us just get spam because we happen to exist, but that's another story. I can't help but wonder, just how quickly I could delete spam if I had high speed internet….Okay, thoughts like that could drive me insane, and I'm afraid it would be a short trip.
