Withdrawal

Hi I'm Michael, and I'm an addict! I stood up in the middle of the Comm Center and made the pronouncement a couple of hours after we started our twelve hour shift.

Hello Michael, replied my colleagues, tittering nervously at the start of a long weekend without Internet access.

Our bosses at the Police Department took away the Internet a few years ago. The ban, for inappropriate surfing - some of my colleagues are dorks- was soon rescinded when we were issued individual access (No Naked People was the order from On High, as though it had to be spelled out), but I swore at the time that I would quit night shift if the Internet was taken away. This weekend it was down as the City was having a new generator installed which required the power to be shut off to all of City Hall at 525 Angela Street, which includes our server. Boo hiss.

I love to read (currently Saturday by Ian McEwan and T E Lawrence's masterpiece for the third time, which may account for my growing dislike in middle age of deserts and rocky wildernesses), but reading in the middle of the night while waiting for radio traffic and telephone calls simply puts me to sleep. I read magazines, the newspaper, anything light and easy, but I keep losing my place and gradually start nodding off. Deglys has made it his life's work to read all of Wikipedia- I kid you not! But he never reads the written word on paper. Noel read all of Harry Potter and Paula plays cross words on line when she isn't reading the sort of novels my wife's book group loves. I am a source of wry amusement because I look at motorcycles, which I figure are neither offensive nor provocative, and generally don't require too much thought on my part.

This weekend I suffered the agonies of the damned in my forced withdrawal. And as I expected the Internet to be gone all night I failed to upload any pictures into my next two posts, so here we are, picture-less and just now barely recovering from the temporary removal of my workplace Internet.

Addiction is no joke and though there are far worse deprivations than loss of Internet, I have to come to terms with how important the Internet is for me at work. On busy nights I breeze through my twelve hours, but on slow nights the ability to wander the World Wide Web is a real boon to help make the hours slip by. Besides, it gives me lots of time to write up all these daily wanderings through the Keys, so my addiction may have a knock on effect.

My colleagues never admitted to their Web addictions as openly as I did, but as soon as we got word the generator was successfully installed, the Comm Center went silent, except for the clicking of mice and the continuing police calls on the radio in the background. Finally I could hear myself think again, thanks to the Internet. For a while there we had to fall back on each other for company, what a disaster.