With All the Speed of a Dead Turtle!

It is the equivalent to using a chisel and rock to write a letter instead of a pen and paper.

It’s like riding a bike to your prom instead of a limo.

It’s like listening to 48 straight hours of commentary by Don West.

I am cursed with a portion of technology that should have died a long time ago with the cassette Walkman, the calculator watch, and the Flowbee.

Ladies and gentlemen...

...I still have dial-up.

I’m going to wait for you all to rise from your faint or close your mouth, which no doubt dropped out of sheer terror. It’s taken me a long time to admit this. I don’t like telling people this because they always pity me and generally feel sorry for me.

Either that or they make fun of me.

Dial-up must be the largest piece of insanity ever to hit this country. Let me get this straight: we have all this technology on Earth. It’s possible for you to get on the telephone while listening to “Love in this Club” as you check your e-mail and get directions to the nearest restaurant so you can watch video of the skateboarding bulldog while you eat...

...but we can’t make high-speed available for everyone?

Given where I live right now, two out of the three high-speed carriers that I’ve checked don’t service this area. What kind of messed up stuff is that? You mean to tell me that because I live in the boonies, I can’t have fast internet? I live in the middle of nowhere, between a town with barely 1400 people in it and a town with barely 160! Not only should I have fast internet, but it should be free!

Everything in this town closes at 8:00 pm or before, except for the video store, which closes at 9:00. You see why I need fast internet.

Unless you have dial-up right now, you have no idea how strenuous it is to sit there and wait for a video to load on Youtube or check out sports highlights on ESPN’s website. It’s hard enough as it is to even go on Facebook when everyone now has 3-4756 applications on their profile. The wait is horrible. There’s really no reason for it to take over 5 minutes to load a page.

Let me put it to you in sheer numbers:

Average time it takes to download a file roughly 1 MB in size: 10 minutes

Average time it takes to upload a file roughly 1 MB in size: 15 minutes

I was once sent the link to a Youtube video that was over 8 minutes long. After 20 minutes, I’d only gotten to see 35 seconds of it.

That’s not all. Uploading a 20 MB file over dial-up takes nearly THREE hours. Trust me, I know. I’ve done it. Downloading it...well, I’ve never stayed awake long enough to do that.

All those numbers are if your internet doesn’t crash, as is normal with dial-up. There are times when it will just stop, you’ll be disconnected and be left cursing your dial-up provider, the goof who came up with the idea of dial-up, and yourself for not getting something...ANYTHING...better. Remember back in the early 90s when the internet was just getting popular and we all thought this was a good idea? Looking back on those days, how insane were we? Then again, we were just happy to chat with the people we knew and even more with the people we didn’t.

So, when you’re thinking about all that you’re happy with and thankful for, send some well-wishes towards those of us still stuck in the past.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to chisel a letter to Barney Rubble while eating a brontosaurus burger.

(As if it weren’t bad enough that I uploaded this over dial-up, I had to do it twice because I got kicked off. How’s that for irony?)