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The Internet was a wonderful invention – the brainchild of a group of people who will most certainly go down in history as computing gods; there’s no doubt about it. Innovative doesn’t begin to tell the story. Just think what life would be like without the Internet in this modern age…blimey, it would be a severe struggle just to get up in the morning (hmm, funny how I appear to display the attributes of a person who is addicted to the Internet, and there would happen to an article where that sort of behaviour fits perfectly). For a start, you wouldn’t be able to read this *cough* fantastic *cough* blog! A travesty, I say!

To those who cooked up the Internet, I salute you. To those who build the lacklustre…oh, there’s no reason for me to beat around the bush, is there? To those who build and concurrently maintain the crap connection services that drop out more frequently than overwhelmed first-year Cambridge and Oxford students, I am sardonic towards you. Care to hazard a guess as to why I’m so mad? It doesn’t take a genius to work out that I’ve recently had a frustrating episode in my vast series of incidents vis-à-vis Internet difficulties.

Picture this: you’re seated by your desktop PC, putting the finishing touches on a long, often important piece of writing. Let’s say it’s an e-mail you are required to send in order to complete a vital task. And that task absolutely cannot wait; it must be done now. Anyway, you’ve finished writing it, and since it took you around half-an-hour to an hour to conclude, you suddenly feel the urge to exhale deeply, click the “Send” button on the page, then lean back in that ostensibly "more comfortable than before" chair of yours. Maybe you close your eyes for a moment; maybe a wry smile creeps out from the corner of your mouth when you think to yourself “I’ve done it”. Without a second thought, you re-open your eyes to see a very unwelcome message glaring at you through the monitor: “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” (or the message I see nowadays after my switch to the Firefox browser: “The connection has timed out”).

When you preoccupy your mind with a task like the one mentioned for any length of time over 5 minutes, you don’t stop to think about the inherent risks that are bound to come with it as you go along. Other than the Internet collapsing in on itself, it could have chosen to do a random page refresh – which would likely wipe any unsaved information, especially of the variety seen in an e-mail – or it could have frozen for no apparent reason and remained in that state until you concede and switch off the PC (providing you tried the good old Ctrl+Alt+Del trick in vain). It’s not something you only see on television or in a film – or on that advert for BT Home Hub where the guy moves too far away from the wireless base console; 9 times out of 10, the Internet really will cut out on you at the most inconvenient time. It’s Sod’s Law.

In a desperate frenzy, you hammer the “Refresh” button in your browser, believing if it reconnects quickly enough, you’ll be able to re-obtain your work. Then the realisation sets in, and that denial of loss advances to a stage of anger. What results from this anger is down to you and your strength.

As the rage subsides, all equipment may still be intact – if you’re lucky – or you have a shattered keyboard lying in front of you, and a fist-shaped hole in your PC screen. And by the way, if this problem were to ever occur to you on a laptop, chances are you’re going to need a new laptop.

Let me say that finishing up in those positions will not magically restore the Internet connection to its former glory. Don’t ask how I know that…a friend told me?

Now I’m off to scold my Internet service provider.