19.8.06

Techno fear

There have been no posts for a little while as I've been doing a bit more raging against machines. I found myself unable to pick up my emails for a couple of days – the problem being a power “outage” at my internet service provider. When did the Great British Powercut become lumbered with the US term outage, by the way? It looks too much like outrage to me – though that would have been quite applicable in this case as I found myself banging my head on the wall in frustration as I realised just how much I now rely on this technology.

Out-of-the-blue emails can be a good source of commissions for me. Did I have any waiting for me that I didn’t know about, I wondered. Also, many of my regular clients communicate by email. Did they have any cartoon jobs for me? I could hardly phone all of them on the off-chance.

Things then went from bad to worse. I started having internet connection problems, so not only could I not get emails, I could not even connect to the web. At one point, even the telephone helpline was “temporarily out of order”. They were, of course, sorry for the inconvenience. That’s OK then. Back online now though and the few days of missing emails have been sent on. And although I should be thankful it happened at a quiet time of the year, there were a couple of jobs waiting to justify my frustration!