The Dial-up Surfboard

Internet surfing is fast, fun and exciting for some, really slow and tedious for others. I tend to fit into the latter category, since I have to surf the web on the back of a turtle. Luckily, I have never web surfed any other way, so I have no idea what I’m missing. It has been said that if you have dial up you had better not try anything faster, because you will never be able to stand going back. Of course, where I live, there is nothing available but dial up connections or satellite. Since homing in on the roving band of metal space-faring machines is an awfully expensive option… I am left with the watch-yourself-age as you surf turtle.

Surfing this way is productive enough, just as long as you don’t try to open too many web pages all at once. Dial-up can, on a good day, handle about five or six applications at once. Anything above and beyond that is way out of control, and the surfer really needs to slow down and smell the roses. After all, is that not the whole point of using dial-up in the first place…to gain patience as a virtue? With dial-up you have to seriously want to surf…it’s no hobby or time waster. It is a deeply rooted need… an addiction if you will.

Feeding the addiction is a vast array of web sites of any and all varieties. It does not matter what you type into your internet browser…just type any nonsense thing…for example: Purple Cockroach. A normal, sane person would expect purple cockroach to not produce any actual web sites, but a normal, sane person would be very much wrong. Since I am neither normal, nor sane, I actually did a search for purple cockroaches once, and I ended up looking at an entire page of things related to purple, to cockroaches, and of course, to purple cockroaches. Go ahead, try it…Do a search for fuchsia-flavored Bongo Beepers and see what happens…I’ll wait.

There. Now that you have that out of your system, you know that I’m quite correct when I say that there is virtually nothing you cannot find on the internet… that is unless you refuse to look. Looking, of course, is easier for some than it is for others, as some of us who sit on the back of that turtle will always be wondering just what that last video was really all about because all we saw of it was tiny bits and pieces. Likewise, we are unable to listen to music online as it only comes through one note at a time… in fifteen minute intervals.

But people who surf with the dial up surfboard tend to be more contented with their lot in life. They do not rush through their applications, opting instead to sit quietly chewing their nails down to stubs while the internet connection ever so slowly twiddles its thumbs as it deliberates over whether or not to allow the user online or simply allow them the pleasure of continuing to work offline. I have been booted offline in rather creative ways, including the stealth method, which involves me sitting there happily typing something on a web page, and unknown to me, the system has booted me back offline, but my web page is still open on the screen….until I make the attempt to enter my information that I have typed, at which time the computer joyfully informs me that I cannot perform that function offline.

I am, of course, always thrilled to tears to see that proclamation, even though sometimes it pops up on the screen while I’m still online, making me wonder if I’m losing my mind as well as my youth. It also usually causes me to hop up and down while yanking out my hair and stamping my feet. You may look upon it as a tantrum but I prefer to call it a dance performance. If you ever wish to see it live and in person…this dance is performed at least a couple times each week. It is on my list of things-to-do to pass the time between short but sweet sessions of time spent in the real world….whatever that is.