Without light: the morning of our return to the 19th century

Sunday Seven o'clock and forty-five in the morning. The distant murmur of the generator of my neighbors has announced, as of other times, as so many times, that the light has been extinguished. Nothing from the other world. We are used to it I went around the bed a few times, but I could not sleep anymore. So I got up on tiptoe and went to lunch. Then came a mysterious message from my friend Sergio Mohadeb, better known in networks under the name Derecho en Zapatillas. "We have four hours more than 4G and I do not know." I took it for granted that he had been the wrong recipient. I answered with still sleepy interrogation points. A
millennium from the first hour.

In preparing the coffee I entered the website of
THE NATION, like every morning. The owner allowed me to connect the lines, understand the sentence of Sergio. The country was without light. Not a city Not two. The whole country (and parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, we will know later). Sergio's answer came a few seconds later. "Stacks of antennas, Ari." Of course! Without light, there is no 4G. I felt a thrill.

Welcome to the world without the Internet, the world without anything other than the telephone line, without data, without WhatsApp, without email, without Twitter, without., With nothing?

I went to the cafe with the coffee and I started reading. For me, I'm not so electro-dependent, it was not the end of the world. But my friend's words came back to my mind. "Later, I do not know." There was anguish in this sentence that I could not reconcile with the situation. Yes, agree, a mbadive power outage affecting some 50 million people. Bad, ugly, but why this sentence with post-apocalyptic polish, zombie movie type?

Welcome to the world without the Internet, the world without anything other than the telephone line, without data, without WhatsApp, without email, without Twitter, without., With nothing?

I went out shopping, after coffee and a little reading time. The grocery store was full of people and worked perfectly thanks to its own generator. But the Nordelta Jumbo – where we had to buy two things – no. "We open when the light comes back," they informed me.

Of the

Fathers Day

There was nothing left. Rain, wind, power failure. We cancel, because an older man may go down six floors, but how could he go up? I wondered why the fact that the cup was mbadive meant that it would last a long time. "It's not like that," I spoke to several people, but social networks, especially Twitter, always spicy, always politically incorrect, exploded in words and spiritual phrases. What better, let me tell you. There was still 4G, in short. Not a lot.

Back on the couch, after brief shopping and after finding that there were almost no cars on the street, I started to put the situation in perspective. Suppose it lasts a day, two days, a week. There was something disturbing in this idea. The confusion of millennials disconnected from their vital support (4G, Wi-Fi) was not important. I have weighed the amount of food in the refrigerator. The water in the tank. The water in drums. To what extent can gas distribution and semaphores without electricity work? Will there be drinking water in a week without electricity? I invented a sentence: "The generators are not forever."

Tierra del Fuego boasted of being independent of the interconnected system. The others, electro-dependent. Yes, but how long would Tierra del Fue last before she ran out of diesel before the water was cut? without medicine, without food. AySA advised to ration the water. The book could not catch my attention. I watched the gray day there. It did not help a little. But reality had become more interesting than fiction.

Back on the couch, after brief shopping and after finding that there were almost no cars on the street, I started to put the situation in perspective. Suppose it lasts a day, two days, a week. There was something disturbing about this idea

Yes, the Father's Day celebration is definitely canceled. I had thought of a barbecue, go.

The SMS had been returned. But they did not arrive either, for obvious reasons. The minutes began to last for hours and we all understood what would happen if this unusual situation (I remember something similar, many years ago and a bestseller, Blackout ) was maintained in time. The government has announced that it would take six to eight hours to restore electrical service. The news arrived (how did they get there? Oh, of course, there was still something about the 4G, but not much else.) Districts in which the current flow had returned . Six to eight hours. So already the sun would be falling, when the electricity would be back. Then I remembered an old social engineering practice, which consisted of announcing a much longer wait than expected, so that the client feels relieved, even if he has spent several hours without light (or little imported). I said, "It will not take six or eight, it will take less than three."

They doubted my word, but I fell short. By the time the forgotten lights were turned on, the refrigerator started, our neighbors' generator set came out. The 21st century was back. Wi-Fi, data, WhatsApp, everything we think is indispensable, in a way.

But, below, there is another lesson, an old badertion that only a few countries (Estonia, if I'm not mistaken) have been taken seriously. What really missed us during these four hours of an event that we anticipate as a mbad extinction and which has reached the portals of the world's most important newspapers? We missed the internet. Basically, no one thought of the freezer, the water or the gas. In hospitals, fuel or food. We missed the internet. We missed WhatsApp. We have returned to a past that we no longer recognize.

After the light came back, while I heard the still more rebaduring whisper of the refrigerator, I went back to my book (these do not fail, write) and I thought, still once, that the Internet should also be considered a public service. In this case, we would hardly have noticed this annoying incident.