It wasn’t the end of the world, of course, but it felt like it…

“Better keep at it,” I suggested to Chris.

“I will,” he agreed, “it might take some time though. First I have to establish that it’s really dead. How did you find it?”

“Dead as a dodo. Everything is dead.”

“I suspected as much,” Chris looked concerned, “mine’s the same but I’ll take a look upstairs to make sure I’ve done all I can at our end before I call someone.”

“Can you still call out?” I asked. (I meant on the phone.)

“I hope so,” Chris didn’t sound very confident.

“What if you can’t? How are we going to manage?”

“Everything will stop – it will be the end of our world as we know it,” Chris tried to add a bit of levity.

I laughed halfheartedly. Inside I felt rather panicked and desperate. I wondered how long we could last out before going mad…

From the kitchen I heard Chris talking on the phone, then he took the phone upstairs.

“How is it now?” Chris called out (this time to me downstairs, not on the phone).

“The same,” I said, “no signs of life.”

A long while later Chris came downstairs. He was tired and crestfallen.

“He was quite a nice chap,” Chris enlightened me, “but he didn’t know the answer. He’d never come across anything like it before. He thought it was something to do with us. I couldn’t understand his accent very well and we were both tired by the conversation so when the line went dead I didn’t really expect him to get back to me – and he didn’t.”

“So what shall we do?” I asked anxiously.

“Well, we could do like he said and wait five days for the new…” Chris began.

“Oh my God! Not five days! Darling, I don’t think I could last out for five days, or four, or three….” my voice became a little high-pitched.

“But we don’t have to follow anyone else’s advice…” my husband smiled, “I have another idea. Somehow we’ll have to live without the Internet for one night and in the morning we’ll go out and buy a new router.”

And that’s exactly what we did, which is why I’m on top of the world again, tapping out my thoughts to the world. It’s funny to think how our world has changed so much over the last decade; how reliant we are upon a technology that is frighteningly alien to many of my generation and how easy it would be to destabilize a population…