Brian’s fitness journal after a brain stroke
We have now survived almost four days of Internet outage and limited data.
At this point, we are not entirely sure whether the internet outage was caused by the weather, nearby construction, or some secret anti-streaming conspiracy. All we know is that our internet disappeared, and my wife and I immediately entered “rationing mode.”
We tried to avoid using anything that would consume too much data.
The surprising part? We discovered that we use far more data than we realized—even without watching videos or playing games. Apparently, modern life quietly consumes the internet in the background whether you notice it or not.
We also learned that our phone plan belongs to an ancient era of AT&T history. Our plan is so old that they do not even offer it anymore. It includes very limited data, and once we pass 2GB, the speed slows down to something roughly equivalent to communicating through carrier pigeons.
Today, my wife had a rare scheduled day off from work, so we decided to make good use of it and visit the Indian restaurant where we celebrated our anniversary. Her day off had nothing to do with the internet outage, although I suspect the timing felt particularly welcome.
Technically, she could still use her work hotspot, but she does not like relying on it too much. She prefers to save her personal data for work-related needs, especially when internet outages decide to turn life into a survival exercise.
Eventually, we decided it was time to upgrade the phone plan.
The new plan is much more forgiving. Instead of becoming unusably slow after 2GB, it simply lowers our priority after 3GB. In other words, if another outage happens, we can still function like normal humans instead of internet archaeologists.
It was oddly interesting to see how much data we had used in only four days. Even without videos, we had already burned through nearly 1.6GB.
While we were at the AT&T store, I took advantage of their very strong Wi-Fi and downloaded a few audiobooks. I had been avoiding downloads because we were treating our mobile data like a wartime ration.
So even though our home internet still has not returned, at least we now have a better backup plan.
And honestly, that feels strangely comforting in a world where losing internet for four days somehow feels like being transported back to the early 2000s.