Net results: Last week I experienced technology withdrawal symptoms after encountering a problem of a type that I hadn't come across in a decade of owning a mobile phone: I was blocked from roaming.
My life suddenly narrowed down to the perspective of a 12-year-old. I could receive text messages and calls, but I could make neither.
Not that I was told this was a problem. My text messages, some of which were urgent responses to a minor emergency back in Dublin, appeared to vanish into the ether in the normal way. It was just that when I tried to make a call, I kept getting a network busy message.
Even when the network busy message continued for a full day, I wasn't too worried. It was, after all, the Fourth of July, I was in the United States and I figured a lot of people were calling friends and family.
I knew too the phone worked fine in the US as I routinely use it for calls there. Only a few hours earlier, I'd rung my parents in California after my plane touched down in Chicago, so operability wasn't an issue.
Except apparently, it was. Chicago, Illinois, is not rural Wisconsin, its neighbouring state to the north, and it was to Wisconsin I had driven (in a lovely GPS-equipped rental car that guided me along the way and listed amenities, from petrol stations to hotels to shops to restaurants, at every single exit off the freeway as I drove).
In Wisconsin, I had no network options: Cingular was it. And Cingular would not let me roam in Wisconsin with O2. It was absurd. Suddenly, I could barely function using an item that is a ubiquitous tool. No one even notices mobiles as a tool any longer; they are always just there. Except for mine, which was now only half there.
Given that I have chatted to people on my mobile from the veldt in the middle of an African game preserve, from remote areas of Iceland and on the Great Wall of China, it was especially odd to have this experience in the technology powerhouse that is the US, in a state that has its own strong and special ties to the history of computing.
The computing genius Seymour Cray set up his supercomputer company, Cray Research, in 1972 in his small hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. He employed local Native American women to piece together the complex electronic wiring of his famous machines because he said no-one else was deft and adept at doing this intricate work.
Chippewa Falls would not exactly have been the top geographic choice investors would have chosen for Cray's headquarters, but the man was so phenomenally brilliant that it was sagely acknowledged that someone like Cray should be allowed set up shop wherever he darn well wanted and his eccentricities indulged.
Company HQ is now in Seattle, but one of two main US engineering centres remains in Chippewa Falls.
I've been reading Joel Shurkin's engaging computing history, Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors, so Cray popped immediately to mind when the motorway sign for Chippewa Falls came up a short while after I crossed the Wisconsin border.
I confess that I was excited, but I guess that's what you'd call a highly selective bit of tourist information. My Wisconsin relatives were bemused when I gushed about seeing the Chippewa Falls sign and connections to Cray and went back to barbecuing the bratwurst and chatting on their own mobiles.
The useful result of this experience is that I finally figured out how to use Skype, the internet telephony service (www.skype.com).
I am ashamed to admit I hadn't even tried it before, even though it was ridiculously easy to set up. Using the free broadband at my cheap hotel and then my cousin's home wireless network, I could chat away for cents to Ireland as well as my family in the US.
Indeed I was delighted to find that instead of euro a minute roaming charges on my mobile, I was paying about 15 cents a minute to call mobiles in Ireland and barely over a cent a minute to call landlines.
Still, it was a relief to cross back to Illinois and to be able to make mobile calls again. I'm happy though that I had this little aggravation because as a result, Skype is now my method of choice for calls in any situation where I have broadband.
Blog: www.techno-culture.com
