An Internet Junky’s Panic Attack.
Most mainlanders think we have beautiful, balmy weather here year ‘round. Would that were so. I don’t know what it was like on any of the other islands, but on Monday night we really caught it here on Maui. There was some thunder and it rained hard in many parts of the island, but the lightening was something I’ve never experience at any time during the 55 years I’ve lived here.
There were lightening strikes—a lot of them—with many hitting transmission lines and other exposed equipment and infrastructure belonging to Maui Electric Company (MECO). Tuesday morning things were a mess. Most of the island without electricity, which meant there were no traffic lights working.
Our power went out sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. We’re in a rural area, meaning we’re way down on MECO’s priority list. I was about to head out looking for big bags of ice around 4:00 yesterday afternoon, when the power finally came back on.
Everything was back up and running except our WiFi, which meant, of course, that we had no internet connection. We had no idea what was wrong or what to do or who to call, and given the magnitude of the fallout from the storm, the prospect of getting someone to come out here and restore the internet connection for two people was clearly not in our immediate future.
I literally had feelings of desperation. We had no email—coming in or going out. How many people had tried to reach me and were awaiting a response? I couldn’t access the New York Times (what’s Gail Collins saying about Trump today?) or the Boston Globe (Have the Red Sox picked a new manager?). My God! I’m overdue for a post on the blog!
This morning—well, actually, it was just after 4:00 a.m.—I awoke from a restless night, turned on the computer and found that the WiFi had healed itself and we were back on line, all systems functioning normally.
If you want to know how dependent on the internet we all are, just find yourself without it and with no idea when you’ll get it back. It is not a good feeling.
