Did I Have A Life Before The Internet?

I live in a part of northern Virginia that prides itself in being rural, pastoral, and totally lacking in modern communications. Electromagnetic waves from the outside world seem to hit a barrier at our borders, and communications with the outside world often seem to be limited to smoke signals and cans tied to a string that is stretched tight.

Having spent much of my working career in high speed communication systems, I feel like Captain Piccard after being beamed down to an uninhabited planet without his communicator.

Living in this community where morse code sets the standard for data transfer is a primary cause both of my high blood pressure, and my dwindling financial resources. The high blood pressure part of that equation comes from my screaming and cursing whenever my Internet connection slows to glacial speeds or stops. And the dwindling resources is due to the expense of my continuously changing Internet providers as I search for the holy Grail, where the Holy Grail is a few hours of communications when accessing a website does not take longer than the gestation period for my children.

One of my neighbors told me I shouldn't have moved here if I wanted good Internet service, but when I moved here there were no I Phones, no I Pads, no U Tube, no Gather, no Skype, no FaceTime, no automated software downloads: and paper delivered to boxes at the end of my driveway was the primary conveyor of the news and messages from others.

Times have changed, and within that change I have become an addict in need of a continuous high speed bit stream.

Today, for the third day in a row, my Internet service was down, and I acted like a drug addict after the third day of withdrawal. As I sat there at my desk, breathing deep breaths, struggling to maintain my composure, I got to wondering.

Did I even have a life before the Internet?