When The World Ends

There seems to be a new GenZ trend made popular on TikTok (of course) called, "Silent Walking" where one simply.. walks. No earbuds or headphones, no phone, nothing. Just walks, quietly. 

I rolled my eyes of course, being a GenX. "Silent Walking" to me was 1982 walking to a payphone with a quarter in your pocket. It's just walking. But what I realized about what this GenZ trend is trying to tell us, is that we're too dependent on technology in our lives. They are making apps that sound an alarm when you've been on your phone too long. Some TVs have the ability to shut themselves off at certain programmable times. GenZ people are trying to now distance themselves from their screens.

It got me thinking. What would happen if one of these cyber attacks took out the internet? Well, I got a slice of that life the other day.

Wednesday started out like any other day. Woke up, took my pills, drank some coffee, logged on to work. My S.O. works in my department but for a different team doing a different thing. Our office is under construction right now, so we are seated at a card table in our library. Sitting immediately next to each other. And our systems were both slow and laggy. Now, this is nothing new. Our company cut a lot of IT departments and money a few years ago, so the systems don't run very well. But this seemed a little too much. Our internet started disconnecting. Uh oh. I reset the Wifi, but that didn't help. We have T-Mobile 5G Home Internet, so it relies on T-Mobile cell towers for internet access. Then suddenly...*poof* it went out. And I couldn't get it back. In the beginning of a work day! We were incredibly stressed out. I called T-Mobile, (which was a miracle in itself, since our MVNO we subscribe to uses T-Mobile as one of their offerings which we just happened to have on our phones) who advised that two towers went down in my town - more specifically, fiber optic transfer lines. The ETA was 11:AM Central time (I'm in Eastern Time). It was 9am at that time. We had some ways to go. We just sat at our work laptops trying and trying and trying to connect. 

12 Noon (11am CST) came and went with no uptick in service. I called again. I was fortunate that their Voice services were fine, so I text my supervisor with updates and call for support. T-Mobile told me there was now no ETA but there was a technician out there attempting to repair the issue. 

The rest of the work day went by with us just sitting there attempting to connect over and over and over again, stressed out. When my time to clock out came, I got up, put the laptop to sleep and sat on the couch. I realized that everything we watch on TV is available via streaming only, so we wouldn't be able to watch anything. That's when we got on a ladder and hung the little antenna on the wall and scanned for air channels. We found 8. We watched Married With Children (yuck) and Roseanne (yay) for a while before bed. I would've picked up a book and read for a while, but it was too dark and I didn't want to hold my phone flashlight above a book for an hour. I think we used to have booklights, but I don't know where those went. Anyway...

I woke up in the middle of the night nearly (11pm) and the Wifi was back. I was so relieved. Another day of worrying about how to connect to work was going to be upsetting. 

What would we all do? I can't go back to the 80's or 90's. I refuse. Life is so much easier now. Everything is at your fingertips, information is flowing. Knowledge is a click away. Why would we ever go back to silence?

But if the internet went down... what then? What about those people who have kitchen appliances that rely on Wifi to be used? What if we need to do banking, with a company that has no brick and mortar stores? (before you say "phone call" you should know something about me: I. Do. Not. Make. Calls.). I feel like we are SO dependent on technology that if something were to happen to it, we'd all be lost. We are no longer built for the 80's. Our infrastructure, our society, is no longer that of the 1990's neanderthal. We couldn't do it.

Which is why I am so pissed that I kept trying to get into the cybersecurity scene, but it keeps kicking me out. If you don't have a bachelor's degree and at least one certification, sorry not sorry, you can't help.

I want to help! Because as I said.. silence is deafening, and we couldn't do it.