As most of you know, I’m a techno-geek. I live on my laptop computer, and rely on it for news, entertainment, work, internet, chat, games, etc.
I have a friend in from out of town, and I’m going to do a “tech free” week. Starting tomorrow (Sunday) at 3pm, I will NOT log onto the internet, Yahoo messenger, nothing. (unless it is directly work related)
No Straight Dope, no movie reviews. NADA! I’ve not been free from my computer for years- I am dying to see what it’s like. Will I do housework? Will I make new friends? Who knows??
Hopefully you guys will support me in my effort at a techno-free week. Drop a post in here once and a while so I have something to look forward to when I get back. I will be checking e-mail, as that is part of my workday.
One time, maybe 4 years ago, I decided to determine what real life was like. I went through about five different search engines on the web but nothing useful came up. There was “The real world” website and “Life of Brian” but nothing about real life. I even checked out Life Cereal and Life magazine, but no luck there.
So I hacked into a government agency thinking that maybe they had extra real life that they were keeping from its citizens. They had pictures of the moon landing labeled “real” and “fake.” Maybe that had to do with something from real life.
Frustrated and, having gone through every avenue I could think of, I called a help desk. Why they use that name I have no idea because they are completely unhelpful as you shall soon see. I asked them about some sort of application program called Real Life. They said they had no idea what I was talking about. OK, I said, maybe it’s a software company. She seemed annoyed at me for some reason. So I asked her if there’s anyway I could get a real life. She told me the only way she knew how was for me to turn my computer off. I was silent for a few moments contemplating this. She then asked if anything was wrong. I said that I was confused by her request. She told me shut down my computer and unplug the cords from the power socket. I laughed at her ignorance. My computer doesn’t have a shut down feature, I said. I mean, me being on it 23 hours a day, I think I would know how to turn the computer off, and I can tell you quite clearly that the answer is: it can’t be done. I heard a dial tone shortly thereafter.
So I sat there thinking. Help desk doesn’t help. No websites available. No companies or software products that produce Real Life. Hmmm…maybe I’ll have to invent it. I thought about how my mother was always telling me to get off my computer and go outside. Maybe outside was Real Life. Outside had trees. Maybe trees were real life! That must be it! So I build a program where you could see pictures of different trees and sometimes the trees would grow and the occasional bird would come land in the tree to build a nest or some of the other stuff that birds do. I don’t know. I don’t really pay attention to them all that much. If a bird landed near my computer, I might be interested, but for some reason they haven’t and I don’t bother to figure out why.
So anyway, with my program up and running, I finally felt like I had tapped into Real Life. Content, I got back to surfing the web.
Zette, good luck finding your own real life this week. Hope it’s as sucessful as mine was. Don’t forget to watch the birds. Winter’s coming so they should be out gathering nuts by now.
I read the post’s subject line and thought, “What?! No trance/trip-hop/acid-funk for a week?”
Wow, it is “so” 0218 right now.
Good luck Zette. If you need to, take that old 2400 baud modem that every true geek has lying around somewhere for posterity’s sake and tape it to your arm. You know… kinda like the patch.
Well, the techno-free week went pretty good! It was very freeing not being on the internet constantly. I found that I had a lot of free time- I worked out (learning Tae-Bo), went to the movies (Meet the Parents), dined out twice, hooked up with a friend I had not seen in a while, had a football gathering, planted flower bulbs, cleaned out a very messy room, played my flute, practiced my harmonica, and generally just had fun.
The downsides were:
Missed the Straight Dope, missed my Lycos Games, missed Yahoo messenger, and chat.
I am going to try to do this every other week- it was really a refreshing change!
In January, I’ll be heading to NoVA for 3 weeks of training - sans computer… I’m already starting to experience tremors… Mebbe Santa will bring me a laptop.
