Overreliance

Though it may be difficult for us to own up to, there really is no argument anymore for the majority of the human animal being entirely too dependent upon technology. I’m writing this at my work desk at my office to fill the time until our IT department figures out what’s wrong with our entire system and gets us up and running again. We’re dead in the water right now, on the busiest payroll processing day of the week. It’s not a good thing.

In the past, there would have been a way to get around this, or at least a way to get some of the work done while waiting, but since everything we do now is web-based, we’re at a standstill. Paralyzed. Incapacitated. Do not process payrolls, do not pass “GO”, do not collect $200.

I did initially think, well, I can work on stuff that’s saved to my local drive. Not a bad thought, right? Well, it wasn’t, until I realized that I need to look something up--on the Internet.

Bang went that idea.

So here I sit, filling the time, hoping not too many clients call in because while we can answer the phone, we can’t do much more than that.

Like it or not, an Internet connection is required for just about everything these days. Scheduling appointments, paying for goods and services, running your most basic office functions--everything is connected. Some people even connect their refrigerators, for crying out loud. I mean, what happens when your “smart” home connection is severed? A power outage is one thing, but an Internet outage might end up being just as bad. I’m sure those things have some kind of backup to traditional power sources, or some kind of fallback so you don’t get locked out, but backups do sometimes fail. When you really don’t need them to. Like when you’ve popped out to grab the paper in just a towel because you’ll “just be a second!” but in the time it takes you to spring to the end of the walkway and back, the Internet does a powder and your “smart” front door lock freezes and now Mrs. Henderson at #23 is clutching her pearls, staring at you from her front stoop, scandalized.

Then again, this scenario straight out of a ‘60s cartoon is less-than-likely to occur in these technologically advanced times, because y’all get your news through the web, too, so printed newspapers are headed the way of the dodo. Though perhaps the person in my vignette still subscribes to a print-paper for ironic reasons.

There’s another aspect to this outage that depresses me, and that’s the human element of the equation. In times gone by, an outage like this would have seen everybody out of their cubicles and into a common area to chat and pass the time until things start to work again and you can all get back to business as usual.

That hasn’t happened today.

No, everyone sat in their spaces and dicked around on their phones. Even in a pandemic, we could have stood up and conversed from an appropriate social distance with our masks on. But no, for the first hour of this nonsense everyone was glued to their phones. It’s been a while now, so people are starting to move around and get chatty, but I can’t help but feel that we could be being more social.

Says the person hand-writing a blog post at her desk.

Look, I had to write one anyway, it might as well be now, okay?



FYI: Our IT team got our systems back on line between 12:30 and 1:00 and my team kicked some serious payroll tuchus, and we all got to go home on time BECAUSE WE’RE AWESOME LIKE THAT!