It’s amazing at how dependent we are on the “internet tubes” for everyday life now.  With a fourth major cable that carries life-giving internet digital bits overseas suspiciously severed last month, it shows how dependent we are on single points of failure.  While we lived without the internet for most of our lives, imagine how crippling life would be without it now?  You’d have to write checks manually to pay bills again. 

Human interaction would become necessary again, whether it is for customer service or letter writing since email is gone and there aren’t web sites to report issues anymore.  Who has time for that?! 

Remember when we had to wait for the paper the next day for news and scores?  Now imagine life without being able to read other cities’ newspapers online or getting RSS feeds every time a specific web site is updated. 

Kids would be forced to get someone over 18 to get their porn for them at 7-11 just like in the good old days. 

Instant messaging?  What’s that, in today’s doomsday scenario?  Again, we’d be back to the phones, assuming those are still working and we all haven’t switched to VOIP technology yet.  Our phones at work now are VOIP-based so if the internet goes down, so does our ability to make calls.

Heck, without the internet I wouldn’t have a job.  Sure, maybe I’d be a software tester elsewhere but everything I’ve done the past 7 years has been internet-based application testing.  All of a sudden my skill set becomes as useful as a bathing suit in the Arctic. 

I always thought it was ludicrous that every time I’d call Georgia Power when there was a power failure, part of their recorded message was that you could report your power outage via their website.  Of course, if you don’t have power you can’t exactly log on to your computer to report the outage.  Nowadays I could actually do that since we have a backup power supply that keeps the computer and internet connection temporarily going in case of power failure.  How spoiled is that?

What’s the worst case scenario though?  If those precious internet tubes get squeezed like the Charmin, all of a sudden you’d be forced to TALK to a Ticketmaster agent if you wanted to purchase any event that has assigned seats.  Remember when you’d try calling for 45 minutes to try to get through and if the even wasn’t sold out you got bombarded by 5 or 6 additional sales pitches all while making your ticket purchase? 

Yep, we need the internet now, folks.  Without it, we have rendered our survival instincts useless.  When the day comes, and yes it will come, and the internet is brought to its knees temporarily by sabotage, hopefully we all remember the basic skills we had back in our analog days.