Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Disconnection Notice

A few weeks ago, The Boss and I went to Cape Town for a bit of a holiday. Shortly after our arrival I realized that I left my laptop charger at home, 1400 kilometres away.

At first I toyed with the idea of contacting our Cape Town office to borrow a charger. After being offline for two days, I decided to just bugger it and go without the laptop for a few days. I still had my BlackBerry, and that kept me in touch with everyone I needed to be in touch with. It also gave me all the social networking that I could handle on any given day.

Usually I'm the kind of person that gets kind of irritated when I don't have my daily fix of the interwebs, however, that few days it didn't seem to affect me at all. Didn't seem to bother The Boss either, The Boss being a great fan of Facebook games.

It was during that time that I decided that I need to spend more time "unplugged". I have intended to spend less time in front of a computer, and more time doing stuff in our kitchen. Having recently discovered a fascination of things gastronomical.

Then some weeks after I came to that realization, Pixlet wrote a blog about the power of the human touch. Her article, in turn, was inspired by this article on CNN that states "touching makes you healthier".

All of that got me thinking for a bit. I think perhaps I spend way too much time online. Actually, I don't think I do, I know I do.

I know that I need to unplug more often. Switch the phone on silent, turn the laptop off and just do something offline and unconnected.

However, as I stated in a previous post of mine, I'm a bit of an anti-socialite. I'm not really big on the whole social get together business. Most of my interaction with people happen online. Very, very seldom do I do anything with people offline.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a fault of mine, but more of a character trait. I realize that I need to spend some time offline with people. Very few people can stand the beigeness that is me for periods longer than five to ten minutes and that makes social interaction very difficult. Couple that with the fact that I was born with a malformed small talk gland, and you have the recipe for a disaster.

I suppose that after such a lengthy period of online only interaction, some people might take an invitation from me with a rather large pinch of salty goodness. Added to that is the fact that my living space is not really geared to social gatherings, and myself being very selective about whom I invite into my home. So what is one to do?

I have gotten so used to being unsocial that it is a difficult habit to break. I will, however, attempt to break that habit. I might even extend a few more invitations to some of the people from my social networking circle to get together in real life. All I can say at this stage is that this is a bit of a disconnection notice. I may not be online as much as I used to, or it might be a more gradual shift towards a life offline.