Almost 2 years ago we bought a home laptop with the Windows Vista operating system. At the time, it was the height of technology, but we soon realized the folly of our ways when programs began to stop working, and everything…just…slowed…down.

This marked the onset of a trend of technological failure in my life, culminating in last week’s perfect storm at Entercom Buffalo, in which every piece of digital equipment I used, both at work and at home, failed. It was ridiculous.

First, voicemail went out at work. People couldn’t leave messages, and the ones that were left before the system crashed could not be retrieved. Then our work network went down. None of us in the building could access any of our documents or files. Our company internet went down next. And finally, the coup de grace, my Blackberry stopped working.

For a few hours I was completely cut off from the digital world. It was very strange, and I admit, a bit unnerving.

Then a funny thing happened. The hallways filled with people forced to come out from behind their desks and talk to each other. We were united in our fear and frustration, and with one voice we shouted:

“Where is Jim from I.T.!?”

For Jim’s sake, thank goodness, our digital exile didn’t last too long. Although, I had the distinction of being the last work station in the building to have service restored. Over the weekend I bit the bullet and bought a Windows 7 upgrade, which miraculously fixed all our laptop issues, and a quick stop at the Verizon store got my Blackberry working again.

This all begs the question: when did we become so dependent on computers that we can’t even function without them?

There was a sci-fi novel I read in college about the future of the human race, in which mankind lived on, but grew increasingly stupid as computers and various machines took over most of the duties and jobs that humans used to do. Pretty soon man lost the knowledge of how to even work the machines keeping us alive, and all that was left were the machines themselves.

When I was a kid I used to take apart my various stereos and put them back together. I changed my own oil, took off the head gasket of my first car engine, even adjusted the carburetor. Today? Not a chance. Nothing is mechanical anymore, everything is digital.

20 years ago when I read that book, it seemed a fanciful notion of the apocalypse, but today I can almost picture it happening as written.

Maybe the Amish have a point…

–Brian