For someone my age, the idea of not being able to get on the internet seems almost preposterous. To live without it for a while or to go a few days without being online is fine, fear is not the issue here. The issue is expectation. I expect that wherever I go, barring wilderness retreats or remote trips, that I will be able to get on the internet with relative ease.
Well, I ran into a situation the other day when I found myself needing to get online unexpectedly for Salty Waffle. I was camping with a friend’s family out in Cottage Grove, Oregon. It is a decently sized city and the camping area wasn’t all too far from town. I got there and realized that I needed to adjust a post to schedule and write the tweets for an article.
No worries right, I’ll take my laptop into town and hit a Starbucks or something. Not. When I got to town I realized that this is one of those sleepy towns that still shuts down completely on a Sunday. I finally found someone to ask where I could get wifi and he said the bookstore up the street might. Only problem was up the street, there were like 7 book stores. Honestly, I felt like I had traveled back in time to a place before modern technology and the rustic décor compounded that feeling.
Anyway, I walked around with my laptop out searching for a signal that I did finally find outside one of the local businesses. It was somewhere between wandering down a nearly abandoned city with my laptop out, squatting in front of a closed store, and the stares I got that I realized I had been taking internet and connections for granted.
See, it’s not only internet that I expect to be able to get on, it’s the expectation that I can almost always talk to a friend, see what they are up to, get quick updates on people I care about, and share back with them what I have been up to. It’s really more about the connections that I lose when I can’t get online than it is the need to look at websites or browse sites.
Salty Waffle specializes in making these connections online. Through social media and various networks we help businesses activate emotion and engage customers through established methods of content production and relationship management. This was a personal little reminder how important these things are both personally and professionally and I don’t think I will be taking my connections, internet or other, for granted anymore.