No “Morning Joe” and No Wi-Fi
My sweet NYC grandchildren!
My mom used to say, “As we get older, we get so patterned.” She usually said this when my sons and I had descended for our annual summer visit and disrupted all of her usual routines. I’m pretty sure she loved having us come and especially loved seeing us leave!
I can definitely relate. I am older and admittedly addicted to my rituals. Every morning after breakfast, I descend to the basement to ride my stationary bike while watching “Morning Joe” and reading the newspaper during the commercials. (Yes, I’m among a dying breed of Luddites who still reads a print newspaper!) Today, however, “Morning Joe” did not come on—nor did anything else on our television. I still got on the bike and caught up with the New York Times, but I felt decidedly discombobulated.
And once I came up the stairs to start my workday, I discovered my computer’s Wi-Fi was also down. I stared glumly at my long “to do,” list, all of which required computer access. Today was supposed to be a catchup day after visiting my NYC grandkids. It was such a wonderful visit. Now I miss them terribly and it’s frustrating not to be able to distract myself by tackling my “to do” list. T-Mobile apparently has a glitch in the system they’re working on, but they don’t know when it will get fixed!
I’m often amazed at how dependent I’ve become on the internet. I’m old enough to remember that doing research meant going to the library and poring through the card catalogue. And if someone requested I send them something, I typed it out and mailed it via snail mail.
In some ways, I miss those days, especially lately. Like every other author on the planet, my inbox is flooded daily with requests from scammers dying to take me on as a marketing client, host me on their book clubs (for a fee), or get me to engage with them by either pretending to be a famous writer who just wants to “connect” or else an editor from a Big Five publishing house. If only! ChatGPT has made these outreach efforts incredibly easy, not to mention relentlessly annoying!
Of course, I wouldn’t really want to go back to pre-Internet days. After all, I recently wrote an article for “In Reference to Murder” about how useful my online research had been in writing DEATH IN THE END ZONE.
Yup, I’m ready to get my internet back up, so I can post this blog and work my way through my “to do” list—even if getting my email up and running means wading through the latest batch of Scams ‘R Us.
Meantime, it’s a gorgeous day out, and I have an excuse to sit outside. With a good book, of course!