Don’t Know What You’ve Lost ‘Til It’s Gone

I find it’s amazing how quickly the internet has become a integral part of my life. Today at work our internet connection was down most of the day and it was remarkable the number of times I was frustrated because I couldn’t go online. I have two editors working out of their homes and the picture department is on the other side of town. So it is certainly easier to exchange certain files over the net than it is to drive there in a car. Recently we’ve had some ADR sessions in Toronto and Montreal. With an ISDN hookup to a local stage we were able to get immediate recordings of those lines but with the internet I was able to download the original files within an hour or so of finishing the session. Even faster than FedEx overnight.

Plus Dana and I tend to have many pop culture-related conversations while we are doing our work.

“‘Dance Fever USA’? That sounds a lot like that movie with Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt.”

“‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’?”

“Exactly. What was the name of the dance TV show on that?”

“I don’t know. But Shannon Doherty was the younger daughter.”

“Yes, but who was the geeky little brother?”

“Little brother? I don’t remember that one.”

“‘Tune-in Tokyo’? No? Jonathan Silverman.”

“Oh yeah!”

Of course it’s not always that easy to remember all the names or the movies so we’re often going online to look at IMDB or All Music Guide or Google searches. So without the internet today, the conversations tended more towards the oblique.

“You know. The guy. That one who did that thing.”

“The guy? What thing?”

“You know, in that movie with the woman with the hair.”

“Most of them do have hair.”

“No. But she married that other guy.”

Much less fun.

I first got on the internet when I started college in 1992. Twelve years is certainly a long time to be online. However back then it was with my 2400 baud modem—not even comparable to a 512kbps DSL connection today. I don’t think I had a dedicated broadband internet connection in the office I worked in until 2000. Obviously I used the internet a lot in those eight years but it was really only sometime in the last four that it has become so pervasive, so much a part of my life that I feel a sense of loss when I don’t have access to it.