Internet Abstinence

Abstinence: I choose Friday 9:00PM – Saturday 9:00PM. I choose this time window because it was a time away from work. In my job as a Branch Manager for Platt Electric, my job requires the use of the internet all day. Communication with our other branches, main office, and manufactures is thru email and internet research. Even our point of sale system utilizes the internet for communication between out databases in Portland and the terminals at branch level.
Because of the nature of our business, it requires a person to be available on call 24 hours a day, and the manager is the first response. To circumvent this issue I set up the on call system to contact the assistant manager rather then myself. This involved contacting our after hours service, making sure that the outside sales people knew who to contact, and making sure my boss was in the loop. The original plan called for me to be spending the weekend clamming on the Central Washington Coast, a simple diversion from the tech world, even made reservations at a motel that had no internet service. Ah but a simple plan runs amok; weather and flooding prevented the trip. Moving on to my plan B- I spent Friday evening downloading and printing homework assignments for my two online classes, and at 9:00 I shut down the laptop and the internet connection on my cell phone and the project began.
I spent Friday evening completing the reading assignments for this class. Saturday morning brought a foggy damp morning in Eugene, rather than working on yard clean up I worked on formatting my thoughts for my writing assignment for this class. I also spent sometime working on the reading assignments for my second online call: Business Marketing. Later Saturday I did get the opportunity to work on yard clean up projects- I was able to get the inflatable yard decorations dried out and put away. I was also able to finish cleaning up leaves and yard debris, two utility trailers full of leaves taken to the recycle. Between trailer loads, I was able to join my wife at her work for lunch a pleasant break in the day.
While it was a productive day, I found myself missing the internet access several times during the day. I usually start my Saturday morning by logging onto our work network to review the business of the previous day this gives me a head start on Monday morning. I also utilize the internet for keeping up on world events; the local paper is easily 24 to 36 hours behind.
By Saturday evening I found myself anticipating the time, I could turn on the computer and cell phone access back on. I had received six emails dealing with work only one would have required my attention, it had been forwarded to my assistant and he had taken care of it. I had 32 personal emails mostly spam, one from my son in Seattle inquiring if I had made it to the coast for the weekend.
I found the day an interesting experience, I suspect that I have spent most of my 53 years without the internet and that it was not a workday led to the fact it was not huge issue for me. In addition, I did get some chores I had putting off done.

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