A Day Without Internet in 2021 | MysticPosting

It's April 22, 2021. I am just another university student in Bangladesh. My internet is down for last 6hours and it will not come until 12 more hours. It is kind of a horrifying situation for me. As much as I want to say, I am not addicted to my smartphone and the internet, this scenario always reminds me otherwise. Let me clear out the scenario.

We are in the lockdown. Covid-19 has locked us all down for 400 days. We have one primary instruction from our government and that is to stay inside our home. Staying home is not a hard thing to do when we see it at the first time. But without any activity to do, human often get bored. To cope with the boredom, we used to do many things back in the days. But in this decade, we all have been doing the same thing. Logging in to the Social Medias. Besides Social Media, we do other stuffs but most of them are on our phone or PCs and connected to the internet. As there are no internet, there is nothing to do. And we are pissed about it. I am saying "we" as it's not just me. My whole family (consisting my parents and my sister) are also filling the same boredom as I am. They are also addicted to their smartphone and the SMART way of life.

My father, who is 65 years old uses Facebook regularly. Everyday he wakes up and checks his Facebook. He watches videos in YouTube and occasionally reads news on the web too. He is so active in Facebook that he posts regularly there and stay connected to almost every friend he has there. Even I am not that active in Facebook. So when he realized, there was no internet he was pissed. He came to me and asked if I have communicated with the ISP (Internet Service Provider) or not. I, of course have done that already and he was relived. But as the internet did not came, I saw him scrolling his news feed without internet. He is watching all the cached posts from Facebook and trying to find new posts. Sorry dad, without internet your news feed can not be updated. That's  how internet works.

My mother, who is 50+ years old uses more social media than anyone else in our house. It may be hard to believe but she uses almost every mass used social media you can think of. She uses, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Imo and YouTube. She is a housewife by profession. So whenever she gets free time, she calls to her friends and have a chat about their days. She does not use messages. She uses the call feature and talk to other aunties in our neighbor . Most of them are my friends mother or my sisters friends mother. She also keeps connected to all my relatives via audio calls. Good thing we brought her the smartphone, so now she won't be bored after her works. She used to watch TV but a few days back our TV got fused because of thundering so she does not have that option today. She is now scrolling through the cached news feed like my father and also complaining about the internet.

Lastly my sister. She is 27 years old and she is from our generation. She is the only one I thought who would get bored the most with me but it feels like we both are the two least bored person. The reason  being, we have mobile data. Both of my parents do not have mobile data pack in their phone. They uses WIFI and that's all they know. They generally do not buy data and can not care less about buying. You may ask why have we not shared out data with them if we have mobile data. The fact is, we live in the ground floor and the mobile signal here is soooo bad. We can not even answer calls when we are in our rooms. We have to go near windows just to talk to people when they call. Previously, I could never get 4g sign in my room. But for a month now, I can see 4g but the speed is very low (around 10 KBps). It can hardly send message in WhatsApp, let alone watch Facebook video or YouTube. It takes couple of minutes before our message is sent in messenger. So, sharing THIS net with them via hotspot is not a good option. As for my sister, she is at her room with my laptop and probably watching the shows I had downloaded. She is irritated but not pissed like my parents.

I can still remember the days without internet. There was a time, we did not had internet. And the fun part about that time was, we faced load-shading. We used to run like crazy to find candles and tried so many different stuffs with them. In summer days, we went out of our home to get fresh air. We did not had to study for an hour. It was a amusing time and we all wanted to have more load-shadings. But now, Load shading means some times without internet. We get bored and wait for internet to come and get online. Social media and smartphone has made us social and smart but in a weird way. It took the livelihood from our life and made us be like a robot. There are a lot of people who are free and frank on Facebook but in real life they are introvert and shy. Being introvert is not a bad thing but the problem is that many extroverts are also becoming introverts in real life. 

We humans are social beings. In the first line of every social study lesson we read and write that statement. But this internet is making us the opposite of that. The pandemic is not helping the situation either. Even before Covid, we used to hangout and rather than talking to each other we used to scroll our smartphone to be up to date with our online profile. May be, this is the new normal. May be, the future will be more this way but to be honest the old days without smartphones were something to cherish. 

*I just realized, it is around 9PM and my parents are asleep and my sister is probably sleeping too. I have not seen them to go sleep this early in last couple of year xD. This shows how dependent we are on the internet these days. *

As for me, after I figure out my internet service was down, I did the basic diagnosis and troubleshooting. I rebooted the router at first and I checked if my WAN port was getting any signals or not. Then tried to check the configurations. Ours is a local ISP who provides static IP with manual DNS servers. They switched their primary DNS a couple of time in last two years so tried all of them but still, the internet was down. I asked Rasha bhai, if he had internet of not. His connection was fine. So, I finally called my ISP and ask them to have a look. They came after a couple of hour and told me that my ethernet cable connection to their box was loosen so they took their time and fixed it. My internet was up and running (for a while). In that time, I have downloaded a video editing software called VSDC to edit some of our Valorant clips. Edited two clip of Rasha bhai and uploaded to YouTube as my third video. As soon as my upload was completed, the internet had gone down once again. It was just up for around an hour. I called the ISP again. 

This time I thought, they will accuse my router, saying my router was the problem. But I was fully prepared for that. Around a week ago, there were a thunderstorm in DHAKA. In that thunderstorm, everyone from our building and the building behind ours lost their router. I had two router and one repeater in my home. Only the router connected to my ISP's ethernet cable was damaged. The strange thing was, the router was working fine, just the WAN port was damaged and could not send or receive any signals. This makes me believe that the thunder that damaged the router came from that ethernet cable. To prove my theory I had two hypothesis. Firstly, the secondary router I had was unharmed as it was connected to my primary router with a ethernet cable. If it was the wall current that damaged the router then it would have damaged both routers. Secondly, our TV was connected to their line too and it also broke. No other electronics were harmed. So now, I am using the secondary router as my primary router with a repeater to cover the whole home space. This router is almost as good as new. If they had told me, this has a problem they would have a big argument with me. Thankfully they did not. They called me at 8PM and let me know that the cable was damaged and they will fix it tomorrow morning. 

Now, I am living a 18 hour day without internet. I have tried to download a movie from Netflix just to pass my time but I do not think it will be finished. So, I'll be watching How I Met Your Mother till Dusk. Will probably get the food ready for SEHERI and will try to get back to sleep ASAP. And, on the other hand, as this internet issue is way too much, I am probably switching my ISP. I'll be getting a national ISP naming Triangle. Hopefully, it will be a good experience.

It's 10:30, the next day. Internet just came back. Had to wake  up this morning to help them configure everything. I'll be heading back to sleep so before that, I just wanted to post this. If you like my blog, you can follow me in Facebook and Instagram .