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I, a child of the digital generation, one of those whipper-snappers on the U-toobs, learned a hard lesson about technology earlier this week.
My best friend lives in Kenya. Just two weeks after we graduated college together last May, he climbed on a plane and flew away to Kimende, a village a few hours from Nairobi, to help install Internet systems in area grade schools. He lives with a host family about an hour’s walk outside of town in a home that has sporadic electricity and, if the atmosphere carries the signal just right, Internet for five or so minutes each day.
The nearest mail service is in Nairobi, a city that he gets to only once every couple of months. But when he’s in Nairobi he typically has a good, solid web connection, so we use the opportunity to pull out our webcams and chat over Skype for a few hours.
Thursday was that once every couple of months. He was spending the day at the compound of his volunteer organization, which just so happens to have a good Internet connection, and was going to be waiting for me after I got off work (at midnight his time) to chat for awhile.
A few minutes before I left to meet my friend I received an email from him asking how soon I would be online. I decided not to answer, knowing that I would see him in some 10 minutes, and instead hurried through the rest of my work, drove home, and hopped online.
But when I logged onto my computer my friend was nowhere to be found.
He was not on Facebook, despite the fact that he had posted on someone’s wall an hour earlier. He was not signed into Skype. He didn’t respond to email.
I did a pretty good job of playing it cool. I knew he wouldn’t blow me off (what did he have to do in Nairobi in the middle of the night?), so I just sat there, waiting. I let an hour pass. Then another. Before I knew it the sun was down and my wife was trying to force-feed me dinner while I freaked out about the fate of my friend in Kenya.
I thought about shelling out the money to call the compound in Nairobi (at about 3 a.m. their time, mind you) to make sure everything was alright. I spent some time searching hashtags on Twitter to make sure some sort of international crisis hadn’t occurred in the city during the 10-minute period between his last message and the time I logged in at home.
I, a child of the digital generation, one of those whipper-snappers on the U-toobs, learned a hard lesson about technology earlier this week.
My best friend lives in Kenya. Just two weeks after we graduated college together last May, he climbed on a plane and flew away to Kimende, a village a few hours from Nairobi, to help install Internet systems in area grade schools. He lives with a host family about an hour’s walk outside of town in a home that has sporadic electricity and, if the atmosphere carries the signal just right, Internet for five or so minutes each day.
The nearest mail service is in Nairobi, a city that he gets to only once every couple of months. But when he’s in Nairobi he typically has a good, solid web connection, so we use the opportunity to pull out our webcams and chat over Skype for a few hours.
Thursday was that once every couple of months. He was spending the day at the compound of his volunteer organization, which just so happens to have a good Internet connection, and was going to be waiting for me after I got off work (at midnight his time) to chat for awhile.
A few minutes before I left to meet my friend I received an email from him asking how soon I would be online. I decided not to answer, knowing that I would see him in some 10 minutes, and instead hurried through the rest of my work, drove home, and hopped online.
But when I logged onto my computer my friend was nowhere to be found.
He was not on Facebook, despite the fact that he had posted on someone’s wall an hour earlier. He was not signed into Skype. He didn’t respond to email.
I did a pretty good job of playing it cool. I knew he wouldn’t blow me off (what did he have to do in Nairobi in the middle of the night?), so I just sat there, waiting. I let an hour pass. Then another. Before I knew it the sun was down and my wife was trying to force-feed me dinner while I freaked out about the fate of my friend in Kenya.
I thought about shelling out the money to call the compound in Nairobi (at about 3 a.m. their time, mind you) to make sure everything was alright. I spent some time searching hashtags on Twitter to make sure some sort of international crisis hadn’t occurred in the city during the 10-minute period between his last message and the time I logged in at home.
In the end I decided to wake up extra early the next morning to either get a hold of him before he left to return to Kimende or to place that long-distance call to the compound. When I hopped on my computer I found an email from my friend explaining that the Internet had been touchy all day and had, for some reason, gone down throughout the compound.
His message had been sent 10 minutes after I had gone to bed.
Distance has a funny way of elevating rather mundane situations to the level of emergency in the blink of an eye. Had I been unable to call someone across town all day I would have assumed that I was just missing them or maybe that their phone was broken. When I couldn’t reach my friend who is comfortably residing in a well-secured compound in a relatively safe country, I assume that the world is ending.
Modern technology enables modes of communication that were impossible only 10 years ago. But just a like a piece of mail lost during processing, sometimes the medium just doesn’t work.
We’ve forgotten the days when Internet connections were lost when someone in another room picked up the phone and tripped the modem.
Technology still fails and that when it does the world doesn’t end. It may be horribly annoying, but just because a letter doesn’t make it to its destination doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone waiting to receive it on the other end of the line.
