As you may remember, last semester just before finals, our campus experienced one of the Worst Davidson Wifi Outages of our time. The time of day (starting around 4pm), the time of year (only a couple days before Reading Day) and the length of the disconnection (approximately 5 hours, if I remember correctly) all contributed to its status as Number One Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened. This Wifi outage was particularly brutal as it prohibited not only procrastination — a very important part of finals season — but also actual work. Shockingly, sometimes we need Internet for research and academia, not just Facebook stalking and Buzzfeed reading.
During this trying time, I spent a lot of time thinking about how much it sucks to be without Wifi, how depressing it is that isolation from the Internet feels so scary, and how eerily this experience mimics another familiar 5-step process, the 5 stages of grief.
1. Denial. For the first 20 minutes or so, you just think it’s your computer. You disconnect from Davidson Secure, turn off Wifi, reconnect, try again. Still not working. You try to check YikYak on your phone, because if there’s one thing you know about human nature, it’s that if there’s a problem, people will be complaining about it on YikYak. The nature of this problem means you can’t even access YikYak, the shared point of all our communication and commiseration.
2. Anger. This is some bullshit. It’s finals. I have stuff to do. And for once, my stuff is important. Sure, before the Wifi went down I was just scrolling through Twitter, but I do, in fact, have a 30-page paper on censorship to be finishing. Doesn’t the college understand that we have finals? Don’t we matter? Why doesn’t Davidson care about us?
3. Bargaining. If the Wifi comes back right now, I’ll actually do my research for that 30-page paper. I’ll block Facebook and YouTube and Tumblr. I won’t procrastinate. I’ll use my Internet responsibly! I promise!
4. Depression. At some point, sitting in my bed refreshing Google Chrome stops seeming hopeful and starts feeling like the end of all possibility. Instead, I try to reload my Instagram app one more time – nope – and then, in a fit of despair, lay my head down upon my pillow, curl up in my down comforter, and fall asleep. This stage may sound more like boredom than traditional depression, but I can attest: boredom (and the loss of hope accompanied by this boredom) often goes hand-in-hand with depression. Both in this scenario and also, like, for real.
Crying may accompany this stage.
5. Acceptance. I wake. It’s dark out. I head to Rusk for dinner, in search of human companionship and hot food. There, I sit with other sufferers of the Great Wifi Outage of 2015 and we commiserate. We still occasionally tap at brightly colored squares of apps on our phones, but for the most part, we have accepted our fate. The end has come. At least we have each other. And grasshopper pie.
(6. The Wifi comes back. We rejoice. But we do not forget.)