A Brief Moment without Wifi

Earlier today our internet was momentarily cut out, so I asked my sister if she could imagine what life was like without the internet. “No!” she exclaimed. “I was six!” It seemed to her so long ago, when in reality it was only thirteen years. I remember it quite vividly.

We would sit, my sister and I, outside of the house, and I remember a time when I told hr a scary story about Johnny and how he ate someone’s liver and how that someone came back to haunt him – ending it with a scream because the story itself was not that scary. So she screamed even louder and ran inside crying. We would ride our bicycles outside with our neighbor, Kira. We would play with the Vortex I received on Christmas. We would tend to our pet roosters and recall rhymes and tongue twisters such as ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’, I still remember it to this day.

We saw the sun an awful lot. We watched little television, watching only cartoons when it was switched on. We read comic books and were read fairytales to every night before we slept. We would call friends on the telephone and discuss anything and everything that happened outside of school hours. We would draw and write. We would play boardgames like ‘Connect 4’, and I would always win and I once had the entire game-board smacked into my face by my sister because of her jealousy and I remember holding my cheek in my hand and walking into my bedroom where mum was popping a boil on my grandmother’s back and when I removed my hand from my cheek the blood multiplied due to the amount of tears that I cried. We played with Barbie dolls – I owned an equestrian Barbie and I mostly liked the horses and the stable that it came with so I would unpack it, spread it out on my lawn and live a life that I did not have, packing every little piece back up and storing it amongst the mice that never seemed to die in the garage.

Then our Playstation One came along, and we would spend more hours on television. We would play the demo disc that came with it more than the actual games – I was particularly interested in the dinosaur character that roared and walked yet stayed in the same spot. I would zoom into his frightening expressions and make him roar and move him around the screen with a dark background. We would play Time Crisis and Point Blanc with the actual remote-control gun and we would play Tarzan and cry from horror at the scene of the rampage and never passed that level because of how horrifying it was. We would buy illegal copies and hold them as though they were more valuable than gold and we would play each game so many times that they would become scratched beyond repair even if we handled them with care every time. We would watch my father play Doom or Abe’s Odyssey or Driver. And still we had no internet connection, no connection to the world out of reach of our own, yet a strong connection to the world directly outside of our doors.

She could not recall all of that. The cameras we used where we had to wait for our photographs to develop rather than see their previews instantly. We took final photographs, not many of a repeated pose altered each time to accumulate perfection. We went to the video store to pick one movie to rent all week, a new-release that we would watch over and over again. We researched things in the library, collecting many books and putting together information found in them. We bonded, made bonds and broke them each within reason, unlike unreasonable broken or created bonds with people we may never have the chance to meet. We had time to treasure things, and we all moved in a slow, steady pace.

And then the wifi was connected again. We spent three total hours wondering why certain devices would not connect, changing the password and memorising it, and all of the sudden life without the internet was forgotten again, and life became fast-paced and rapid.