On a Desert Island, no pictures

It was a person no less insightful than Shakespeare who wrote that "troubles come not single spies but whole battalions". There is also the superstition that bad things come in 3's.

I think I have shed most of my superstitions, but the past week almost made me reconsider the one about bad things coming in 3's.

One of the worst things that can happen to a typical contemporary person, a person who has come to depend on the computer and the internet, is his/her computer or net connection going down. This was a form of depression or desperation unknown in the days when a personal computer was only a word processor. Now, since the computer and the net have become the essential means of contact with the world, and even with oneself, because so many of us now Twitter or blog almost every conscious moment not just for our friends' sakes but for our own, losing that technology is the new version of the dreaded stranding on a desert island of Mutiny on the Bounty days.

Last week in my area there was a power outage at the precise moment my wife was putting dinner into the microwave. When a few hopeful flickers of the kitchen light were followed by a long period of no electricity, it was evident that we would have to go out for dinner. That was not the bad part.

After dinner, and after perhaps watching the news on television, it has become the habit of my wife and I to go to our computers, one upstairs, the other downstairs, log on to the internet and pursue various pleasant activities on it. We often e-mail each other when we come across something we want to share and this may lead to a series of e-mails back and forth between us. If you think that is bizarre, well, try running up and down the stairs a dozen times in quick succession, panting, only to forget what you were going to say (Hey, it's normal to be losing some short-term memory and stamina at this point in life), or yelling out to each other: "Honey, look at this link!"

Electricity still had not been restored when we got home from dinner, and since our computers are networked with a modem which relies on electricity, it didn't matter that one of the computers was a laptop. We lit candles and were sitting down to what could have become a romantic conversation when my spouse realized that her iPhone uses a cellular connection, and so was still functional. I felt like Robinson Crusoe watching Friday rowing away from the island and waving : "¡Hasta la vista, Baby!"

That was Bad#1.

The next night I got a call from my sister who lives some three thousand miles away in another country. I mention this because for her making any toll call is not something she takes lightly. Normally we communicate frequently on Skype. Her tone was one of controlled but not entirely disguised panic. "I can't get my modem to work!" she blurted out. No amount of long distance support could get her modem to show more than the minimal sign of life, a red light. She had to give up but even though she is not nearly as dependent on her computer as I am, she was clearly at a loose end. How could I tell my sister that there was no hope? So that brought on my second Bad.

Then last night I read the latest post of my friend Ric. There was the third tale of a gentleman struggling to come to terms with a recalcitrant computer. How I empathized with him!

Since that was the third Bad I trust the spell is over.