Itchy Fingers: Am I an Internet Addict?

Posted by: Lauren Young on June 13, 2008

This is written by Savita Iyer-Ahrestani, a freelance financial journalist now living in The Netherlands who guest blogs for Working Parents every other Friday.

What do you do when all systems fail, when both your Internet connection and your telephone die and you’re cut off from the world?

In an office, you (and me) would unleash our wrath on the tech department, whose job it is to sort such things out in (one would hope) record time. Since I work from home, though, I have only myself to rely on, so my only option after a vicious electric storm fried the cable modem that carries my Internet, my phone and my television connections, was to call UPC, my erstwhile service provider — from my cell phone (since I no longer had a landline), at the outrageous rate of 10 eurocents a minute plus charges (they use 0-900 numbers in Europe even if it’s their mistake).

Forty euros worth of credit later, I was still listening to a recorded message in Dutch. An angry tirade at the UPC store in downtown Arnhem (the city I live in) resulted in a free calling card that supposedly would connect me directly to the company’s tech department at no cost. But just as a human being finally came on the line, the card ran out and I was cut off.

“I’m a journalist with deadlines, I have articles due today in New York and London!” I shouted. “You have to do something. Can’t you just give me a new modem?”

No, the man at the store said, insisting that he was making an exception for me by calling UPC’s tech department himself. Even so, “they will not come until Friday,” he said. (It was Monday).

So there I was with a mountain of work and two kids. I had no choice but to park myself and my children, after I picked them up from school, in a noisy and smoky Internet café, where I bought time on three different computers and tried to ensure my kids’ didn’t look over at the sites a skinhead with “KKK” tattooed on the back of his skull was browsing.

The good part about technology is that I can log into both Yahoo and Skype from anywhere. The keyboard was American, but no matter what I tried, I just could not make the Dutch pop-up menus disappear. Nor could I tell the person next to me that the music videos he was watching/listening to were so loud, that the person I was interviewing through Skype could not hear me. After all, this was a public Internet café, not my home office.

Still, despite the inconvenience of it all, I couldn’t help but feel I had accomplished another milestone in my freelance career, and proven to myself that I could pretty much get my work done under any circumstances.

But I also realized that I am an incredibly Internet-dependent person and living without it is, for me, extremely difficult. And I am so used to having the Internet that I have probably been abusing it.

Yes, I have to use it all day for my work. But there I was in my apartment at night, staring at a dead modem, and my fingers were itching for my keyboard. Even if I hadn’t had to work, I would probably have been online (procrastinating on or even neglecting other tasks, yes), writing e-mails that probably could have waited; checking the weather in New York, a city I’m oceans away from; reading reviews in the New York Times of restaurants I’ll probably never go to; Googling – oh, I don’t know, anything I could think of.
Internet addiction is an illness – so if I am the kind of person who, beyond her work, finds it tough to be without a connection, am I an Internet addict?

The next day at my Internet café, I took a couple of quizzes: Netaddiction and Quizland .

My scores showed me to be “an average online user” who (still) “has control over her usage.” Every now and then, though, I do have the tendency to “get hooked,” so, the tests warned, I need to watch it.

Having only limited access to the net has shown me that I do spend far longer on it than I need to or should. But getting my home connection back was still the highlight of my week.

How would you have felt?

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