Life without email....

Okay, so we live in the 21st century.....We depend on our state of the art forms of communication to survive.....cell phones, blackberry devices, PDAs, email, instant messaging, text messaging...the list goes on and on.

But what happens when you are without these things? PURE CHAOS! We have been having major difficulties with our email server for over two weeks now. Each morning, we pray and cross our fingers and click "Send and Receive" and hope that it will be a day when we are looked upon favorably by the "email gods". Today was a good day....most of us had email, but there were many days recently when we weren't so lucky. And, some employees are luckier than others....because some of our employees haven't been able to access their email in over a week.

My point to this post is that who knew how dependent we are on these forms of communications? These days were very nerve-wracking for me. I caught myself pacing back and forth from the copy machine to my office (which is about a 3 minute walk). Wondering around like I didn't know where I was going or where I should be was common during these days. I was physically and mentally lost.... When my email is working, I am a compulsive 'send and receiver'. Every few minutes, I click on my Outlook and hit the S&R. Then, I return back to whatever else I was doing. When I can't hit S&R constantly, it messes with my schedule and throws a wrench into my day.

Adding the fact that my cell phone has been on the fritz lately (it won't hold a charge and doesn't notify me of all calls....until it is a 'missed call'), it has been a hard couple of weeks.

So, am I the only one that is so dependent on technology? I don't think so because there were many of my coworkers who were frazzled by the lack of email access. It does feel strange that I rely on it so much, though. There were days when I jokingly told our executive director that he needed to order us straight jackets. Another employee and I joked that if he saw us rocking back and forth in a doubled over position, not to be alarmed....it was just email withdrawl.

So, the question that I pose to you is: What thing are you dependent upon? Did you realize that you were dependent when you had to go without it or did one day did you just have some other form of epiphany? I'd like to know....I'm generally interested in what you have to say AND I'm searching for someone who is in the same boat! :)

FUNNY NOTE: When I attempted to publish this post. An error message on blogger that I needed to repost it in 10 minutes b/c updates were being made to blogger. HAHAHA I just can't win with technology lately!!!!