1. If the Internet is down, work is over for the day. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been at jobs where if the Internet isn’t working, then work comes to a standstill. How can you work if you can’t send an email, right? Seriously. I was sent home one day at my last job because the Internet was down. Sure, I stopped to chat with a co-worker on the way out. And during that conversation, we came up with a way to effectively tackle a work-related problem. But otherwise, work was over for the day.
2. Buyer’s remorse is much more common. How many times have you ordered a dress, or a pair of shoes, or a television online, only to realize when it arrives at your door that you need to send it back? Buying things online is wonderfully convenient when it’s an item that you absolutely want and are sure to keep. But when it’s not, it can be an all-consuming thing just to figure out how to get it back where it came from. We recently bought a bench online, only to realize after we spent three hours trying to put it together that it wouldn’t work for us. Returning it assembled wasn’t an option and neither was taking it apart since we had hammered some of the screws in place. What did we do? We finally sold the brand-new bench on Craigslist for half the retail price. Internet shopping fail.
3. You don’t live in the moment. Picture the scenario: You are trying desperately to video your third-grader’s solo in her ballet recital. You can’t get the camcorder to turn on. When it finally does finish booting up, it tells you to change the battery pack. You do. And then you realize your daughter’s dance solo is over. There are so many moments we try to capture on video, only to realize that we’re not experiencing the moment we are trying to capture.
Dr. Nicholas Bowman, assistant professor of Communication Studies at West Virginia University, sees it differently, though. “One might counter-argue that while we sometimes remove ourselves from ‘our moment’ by watching something through our smartphone screen compared to watching it with our eyes, networked technologies allow us to live in the moments of millions of people every day — such as following with eyewitness accounts the riots in Egypt, or the tsunami that struck Japan a few years ago or even the delicious burger I prepared on my patio last night,” Bowman tells MNN.
4. Nobody knows a phone number. It’s very possible that you have your husband’s number memorized. It’s also very possible that he’s listed by name on your phone and you haven’t the faintest idea what his number is. If you lost your cellphone and all of your contacts, it’s very possible you’d have no idea how to get in contact with anyone, let alone someone important to you. And you can’t even look it up since cellphone numbers are unlisted.
5. You are dreading having to break up with your boyfriend face-to-face. You’re considering doing it via text message. How many of us today have serious conversations over text message? I know someone who got fired through a text. It isn’t pretty. Text messaging is convenient, but when it comes to getting your message across clearly, a face-to-face conversation is not only best; it is necessary. I can’t tell you how many fights have been started in my house by misconstruing a text or an email, not to mention the amount of time spent poring over text messages analyzing their inflection and meaning. (“What did he mean by ‘I’m OK’ — ‘I’m OK’ or ‘I’m OK’???) All that aggravation could have been saved if someone had just picked up the phone
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