I got up this morning and came in here to check e-mail, as I always do. I had none. NONE. No personal messages. No notes from lonely Russian girls wanting to send me their photo so we could chat. No requests from either Move On.org or Equality California asking for yet another donation to help them get through to election day. No notifications from lotteries from any country that I had won countless millions. No requests from Nigerian potentates to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams.
What the heck? That's like going for three days without receiving a single catalog in your mailbox. Unheard of.
The Internet seemed to be working just fine, so I went to my Gmail account and sent myself a test message. It never arrived.
I called the DCN help desk (which, of course, is closed on Sundays), hoping there would be a recording explaining what the problem was, but there was just the "sorry we're closed" message. I contacted several people who I either knew or thought I knew had DCN and who also had either Twitter or Facebook.
Jon, who was the best man at Jeri and Phil's wedding, got my message and almost immediately sent me an Instant Message on Facebook that he hadn't received any e-mail since 3 p.m. the previous day. He said that the server seemed to be fine (not sure how he checked that,but he used to work for DCN, so I'm sure he Has His Ways) but that mail just wasn't getting through.
In the meantime, I had sent myself an e-mail from my G-mail account and noted that it did not arrive, so it wasn't just that Nigerian Potentates, Russian girls and political fund raisers just all of a sudden decided to give up on me.
I realized how dependent we have become on electronic communication, and laughed at how I had set up back-ups for myself, with g-mail, Twitter and Facebook. I could still be connected electronically; I just couldn't get my DCN e-mail, but at least I could contact some of my friends thru Twitter and Facebook.
The extent to which we have become dependent on electronic communication was brought home when a Davis friend and I were having an IM chat on Facebook about the loss of DCN e-mail. She said that she had sent an e-mail to a friend to cancel a lunch date they had and had asked her friend to respond so that she knew the message had gotten through.
Well, we discovered that outgoing e-mail was OK, it was just incoming e-mail that was jammed up somewhere. She laughed that she might actually have to pick up the telephone and call her friend to make sure that the cancellation e-mail had been received.
A few minutes later, I received the following message:
I thought you'd enjoy this. To avoid the phone, I sent my friend another email (since our email is being sent) and told her to go on Facebook (where we're "friends") and IM me letting me know she got my email canceling our visit. I'll see if it works.
I told Walt that I wondered if the two women lived as close as Joan and I do to each other--2 blocks apart and most of our communication is done on notes attached to notices that one or the other of us has made the next move on our now three-year old Scrabble game.
This afternoon we went to the dog park for the second birthday party for the Rainbow puppies. Last year all ten of them were there, as well as their mother, Callie....
...the only one of the dogs who is not black and white!
The dogs, of course, don't remember each other and, since we had the time wrong and showed up an hour early, by the time we decided to leave, Sheila and Lizzie were very glad to leave the park and get into the car. They came home and collapsed.
But all the puppies are healthy and happy and a great time was had by everybody, including Bosley, the Boston Bull terrier who decided to join the group and absolutely loved everybody.
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