Today’s episode of The Brandonian Doctrine details the story of a former roommate and the mysterious disappearance of an internet connection.

In 2001, I had two roommates. Two of us were gainfully employed, while the third roommate Mike was unemployed. Mike was my college roommate for all four years, and he decided to move from Ohio to Arizona and see what opportunities he could find in the desert.

We both applied to work at the first Apple retail store that was opening in Arizona. Neither of us got the job, and Mike never recovered from that rejection. He lost all his desire to get a job while I managed to secure work through a temp agency as a medical claims processor.

Somehow, Mike was still paying his share of the bills because he had accumulated a nice savings account. Even so, my resentment started to build when I would be up bright and early in the morning heading off to start work at 6 AM while he was still snoozing away. I often wondered what he did all day because we didn’t even have cable back then. He had a few basic channels on TV and his laptop (clamshell orange iBook) and the internet. 

One day I decided to play a trick on Mike. I figured out how to adjust the router to cut off the internet with a quick flip of a switch. I turned it off in the morning when I left for work. That afternoon when I arrived home, I slid open the patio door. We had those long white blinders that covered the door, and through these blinders, a disembodied voice shouted, “INTERNET’S DOWN!!” 

Of course, I had to pretend I didn’t know what was going on and get on my computer to prove that it was indeed down. I had to go without the internet for a bit as well so that it was not obvious that the internet coincidentally came back on when I got home. Some days I would leave the internet up, and other random days I would turn it off knowing Mike would be in for another boring day. One time I even pretended to call the internet company to complain, but they “kept me on hold and I’m not going to wait.” I don’t think he ever caught on to my shenanigans. He never got a job either. At some point, his savings ran out and gave me a week’s notice that he was moving out and driving across the country back home to Ohio. 

I lost touch with Mike, but I always remember this story anytime the INTERNET’S DOWN!!

7-22-20

Nowadays more and more people are working remotely, and on a daily basis, there’s usually someone who says the INTERNET’S DOWN or they got disconnected or they can’t get connected and who knows what the reason is. Now, this happens to everybody. It’s happened to me before. For most people, as soon as it happens, you try to get connected again, you submit an IT ticket somehow, you call the help desk, you do whatever you can to get back online. I think some people take their sweet time. They think, “Well it went down. I guess I’ll just wait until it comes back up.”

Now, there’s a term for people who pretend or exaggerate how sick they are to get out of work. It’s called to malinger. I wonder if there aren’t some people out there who are doing the same thing with internet and pretending that the internet’s down to get out of work. Maybe we need a term for that:

malinter - to pretend that the internet is down to avoid working

We need this term to identify people who always seem to have connection issues or internet problems. May they are just pretending that they keep getting disconnected or that the internet is down so that they can get out of doing any work. 

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone say, “INTERNET’S DOWN!”