On being without internet

It was strange being at the shop without internet because there didn’t seem to be much to do. And there was very little going on. But this turned out to be wrong.

There were customers all day. Everyone chatted companionably about the outage. Everyone had a theory.

An old lady said she didn’t care that the tower was down because she could still work in the garden, and she bought an Elizabeth George, saying, ‘I’ll pay for this with good old cash!’

Robert, who has never been connected to any internet, didn’t comment on it because he didn’t know about it. He said he’s planning to read every Carlos Castaneda book so he could work through the ongoing problem: are they fact or fiction?

I managed to reorganize my entire counter and clean some windows. Once, outside the shop, a group of young men realized they couldn’t use their phones, holding them up in the air toward the sun. One man said, ‘What are you gunna do?’ and his friend said, ‘Fuck knows.’

A man told me he was with Optus and so his phone was fine: he had internet! And his data had already been stolen, so nothing further to worry about.

Alan noticed that a couple he sees every day each go to different bakeries and reckons it’s because one bakery has better lamingtons than the other. ‘But couples should go to the same place, otherwise you cause problems. That’s how I see it anyway.’ Then he went home: meat to cook and a sleep to find.

I read two chapters of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. Brilliant and will continue. I showed the book to George who said he’d been looking for it, but I refused to sell it. He bought a book about elephants for his grandson instead.

Someone told me the Facebook chat page about the local Telstra outage is entertaining and informative. ‘If you have Optus. Lol.’

A teenage reader showed me that her phone was working. An older reader who examined the signal on this girl’s phone (while waiting behind her to purchase a copy of Quietly Flows the Don), advised me that technology always works for young people.

Sarah said that the flooding is getting worse. I told her I couldn’t look up the news without the internet and she said that flooding doesn’t need an internet. She also said the British PM is in a bad way.

A lady told me about Roald Dahl: from her head, not from her phone. I thought maybe I could do a bit more of that.

And so life want wonderingly on.