The Old Internet Challenge V2: Day 3
The internet really should be classified as a human right to have, also as a utility.
I worked from the office yesterday and it only occurred to me while I was heading for the bus that I would have to spend some of my budget on buying a ticket and making sure that a bus was actually going to show up.
It’s possible to buy a ticket on the bus, but they add an extra charge to already over-priced costs, and regarding checking on the status of the busses, the system is pretty awful and the app is really the only way to tell if a bus is going to show up.
This got me thinking about how there is such a great reliance on the internet for seemingly normal services. Change the time limit to a data limit and you start to see where less privileged folks have issues. Public Wi-Fi is a thing, but it’s not always reliable and you don’t know if it’s really safe to use or not.
Take into consideration that services like Job Centres have closed many of their buildings and switched online and that over the pandemic, libraries were closed (rightfully so, librarians deserve to be safe as well), people had to rely on bandwidth limited internet connections or pricey mobile data. “Run out of data and can’t afford a top-up? That’s a shame”.
Challenges like this are fun when you chose to take part in them. I hope others take away a similar view, in that what we’re experimenting with is a reality for a bunch of people still.
I took my X61 into work with me for the off chance that I’d have time to look at it (I didn’t), but I had a chuckle to myself when I realised I wouldn’t need to worry about going over time with it on battery. It still has the original battery in it that doesn’t last half an hour these days even when attempting to cut back on power draw.
At the end of the day, I may have just went over budget taking into account use of my phone. I ended up streaming a couple of short videos to zone out to, but I don’t believe I went over by much as I don’t think I accumulated half an hour during the rest of the day.
I’m writing this a day late as yesterday was again a busy one, but I guess that’s given me more time to reflect.