I’m a night owl. That’s why it wasn’t unusual for me to be wrapping up a feature I was writing for the Citizen-Tribune at midnight like I was doing a couple weeks ago. What wasn’t usual was what happened next. My laptop went black before I was able to send it to the office. I stared at the screen in disbelief before it sunk in. I had a big problem on my hands.

t there’s ever a good time for a computer to die, but of course this was just about the worst possible time for it to happen to me. It was Tuesday night, and along with the feature I had just written I had a number of other articles I had to turn in to the paper before the weekly deadline. 

 

To add to my stress it was also finals week for two of the online summer college courses I was taking. If you aren’t familiar with courses offered over the summer, they’re the same amount of work as a course held over a regular 16 week semester, only condensed into four to six weeks. This equates to a lot of work every day. 

 

I still had a final test to take and a three page paper, a discussion post and three responses to write, all before midnight Friday. Things weren’t looking good.

 

Wednesday morning I brought the laptop in to a company in Sartell who said they could fix the problem and have my laptop back in my hands by Thursday afternoon. 

 

This would have been great news if not for my deadlines. I had run a backup a week earlier, but everything I needed for both work and college had been added more recently. There was nothing to be done but wait. 

 

As I stressed out for the next 28 hours the fact hit home that we have become a society that is almost completely dependent on technology. What started as something to assist us has become vital in nearly everything we do.

 

More evidence of this came crashing in less than a week later when a severe storm came through and knocked out our power. Our once-humming household came to a screeching halt.

 

Our daughter couldn’t get her car in the garage after work; I couldn’t get mine out to go to a meeting. The washing machine full of clothes stopped, as did the ceiling fan cooling off the upstairs. Our weather radio had quit working so we had no way of knowing whether more storms were coming through. Our internet isn’t that great at the best of times and during bad weather it’s worse, so our phones weren’t much help.

 

The supper that was planned was scrapped because we couldn’t use the oven or the microwave. We didn’t want to open the refrigerator unless we had to so it would stay cold. We left the toilet unflushed. 

 

The laptop and iPad weren’t charged so they couldn’t be used. Watching TV was out and because it was dark so was pretty much everything else. 

 

All the usual aspects of life we take for granted were unavailable to us. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

 

There’s nothing like doing without to remind us of just how much of an impact technology has on our lives. And it continues to become more so by the day, making our lives easier while we grow more and more dependent on it.

 

I’m not saying that technology is bad. It’s not. It’s improved our lives a thousand fold, but we need to try and take a step back from it now and again. It’s become such a necessary part of our lives that when things take a nose dive even the simplest tasks appear impossible without it.

 

I worry about our overdependence on technology and how we’re losing the ability to do without when it fails. It’s not infallible, so be prepared. Like when you’ve got deadlines and your laptop gives out on you.