But a couple of days ago was 9-11.

The Little Black Dress comes back from “town” and says everything is down. There’s no internet anywhere. No internet, these days, means no credit/debit transactions. Gas stations, grocery stores, everything was cash only.

We were in the Dark Ages.

And people started whispering. Were we under attack again?

Fortunately, my trusting Blackberry was working.  Quick check of various news feeds showed nothing too amiss, other than CNN reporting the Coast Guard was firing shots somewhere near D.C. But it was CNN so I wasn’t going to get too excited.

With phone lines down as well, I use my Blackberry to call our internet/DSL provider, who shall remain nameless.

I hate talking to robots. I especially hate it when they don’t understand what I’m saying. And I really hate it when I end up shouting at this automated voice that keeps saying, “Sorry, I didn’t get that, did you say you wanted fries with that?”

If you start talking gibberish long enough, the robot soon overloads, gives up and passes you to a real human. In India.

So after explaining I’ve already done all the reboots and plug in and plug out there is to do, I just ask to get it fixed.

My work involves a lot of internet work. In fact, my business is internet-based. No internet, no work.

So I’m informed the tech support will call within 30 minutes. And they do. Surprise. But it’s a friggin robot again, telling me everything is fine. Um, no, it’s not because they had to call my Blackberry number.

The robot is nice enough to give me a toll-free number to talk to a small surving band of humans in some buried tech center. I call, they can’t help. Their “network” is down.

It’s getting interesting. So I decide to drive into our little town and check out what’s happening at the local gas station/gossip center. Turns out some construction worker cut the fiber optic cable.

No terrorist attack.  A little stupidity on someone’s part, but life goes on.

Sort of.

With all my high-tech gadgets, it takes a face-to-face to find out what’s going on. With all the power of the internet, e-mail, Blackberrys, Twitter, Facebook, instant message or any other electronic device, I really couldn’t find out anything.

I had to do a little “just flip the dog.” Throw it all out and actually go talk to someone. In person.

And you know what? I survived. And met a couple of nice people.

We are relying too much on electronic “stuff” to communicate. And we’re missing out. Twitter, IM, e-mail, whatever, has its place. But it will never replace just sitting down and talking with someone.

We are losing our ability to communicate. That is not a good thing.

So take the time, walk down the street, down the hall, and actually talk.

Seventy-five so far today.

I could make some comment about how people are willing to pay 20 cents a pop for a text message, but won’t pay for an online subscription to a newspaper, but I won’t.

I am a little leery of information overload.

A couple of thoughts.

The “tracking” feature, which I finally dug up in an old Twitter blog, has incredible potential. Of course, I could never get it to work and after a couple hours of digging, realized it was disabled after a few months of running. To me, this is one of the powerful elements of Twitter – the tracking, or ability to “follow” a particular subject, company, phrase, etc. – in real time. What are people saying NOW about subject X.

And that is a second powerful element of  Twitter – the search function. Google searches for what’s already out there/published. Twitter provides real-time search on what’s going now. There’s serious potential in there..

I realize you can use http://search.twitter.com in place of “track” right now. I’ve tried it and it works well.

But I’m mobile more and more, and rather than having to go online to use search, I wish I could follow subjects through texts instead.

Rumor has it the track feature will be back, or maybe it is and I’ve just missed it. But everything I try the command, it posts like a tweet.

Anyone know if the track feature will be back, and if so, when?