Critiquing the Politics, Policy & Practice of Development
- You log off for four minutes to make yourself a cup of coffee and AT&T assumes there must have been a fault on the line and sends a repairman to fix it.
- You refuse to go on a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone lines.
- Your bookmark takes fifteen minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
- You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to call 200 hours per month “unlimited.”
- Your phone bill comes to your door in a box.
- You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you landscape.
- All of your friends have an @ in their names.
- The last girl/guy you picked up was only a jpeg.
- You start tilting your head sideways to smile
- Your eyeglasses have a website burned in on them.
- You don’t know the sex of your closest friends because they all have neutral nicknames.
- You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, like you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
- You refer to going to the bathroom as downloading.
- You step out of your room and realize that your parents have moved.
- You kiss your girlfriends home page instead of her.
- You tell the cab driver you live at http://123.elm.street/house/bluetrim.html
- You actually try that 123.elm.street address.
- You wake up at 3am to go to the bathroom and stop to check your e-mail on the way back to bed.
- You check your e-mail. It says no new messages, so you check it again.
- Your fantasy dreams at night are in HTML.
- You get a tattoo that says, “This body is best viewed with Netscape 3.0 or higher or Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher.”
- … your connection goes down suddenly and when you try to reconnect, you are unable to get a dial tone. Stumbling out into the front hall, you discover under the pile of unopened mail two bills and three final demands from AT&T, the earliest dated six weeks ago.
- … you get fired from your job, and all you can think is “At least I’ll be able to spend more time on-line now.”
- … an attractive single person of your preferred sex and orientation asks you over to their place for supper and you try to persuade them to meet you on IRC instead.
- … they finally manage to convince you to leave the house, and you turn up for the date with a bottle of cheap wine and a laptop with an internal modem.
- … you contemplate robbing a bank so that you can buy a leased line, but reject the idea on the grounds that if it goes wrong you probably won’t be able to get a terminal in your cell in Pentonville.
- … you finally open the curtains and discover that the other side of the street has been bulldozed and turned into a theme park, and the local gangs have spray-painted a mural on the front of your house.
- … the lettering on the keys ‘n’, ‘t’, ‘p’, ‘k’, ‘i’ and ‘c’ on your keyboard has been worn away to nothing, but that doesn’t matter because you can type ‘nntp kick’ with your eyes closed anyway
- … your phone bill is delivered by UPS, and Brinks Armored Car Service comes round to pick up the payment check.
- … you’re filling out a warranty registration card and you can’t remember where you live, so you write down the URL of your home page instead.
- … you install two phone-lines and an extra serial card so that you can ‘hot-swap’ modems without losing your connection.
© 2006 The Discomfort Zone. 
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