On Friday afternoon, one of C.'s hard drives started to fail. His system was therefore unstable, and so on Saturday, he bought a new hard drive. Hard drives decadently big things these days. It's now normal to have a 120 G hard drive, substantially larger than all the storage space of our current hard drives combined. Installing a new operating system is always time consuming, and C. used the new drive as a reason to change operating systems, so that, of course, meant he spent much of yesterday evening struggling with the system differences and how to keep the graphical interfaces from overwriting his manual changes. At the end of it, he could still save the data from the failing drive so, in the long run, this should all be well worth the time and changes. Thus, I couldn't mind too much being offline, since it was in the name of a good cause, and anyways, none of the email replies I was waiting on were actually urgent.
It's the absense of communication and convenience I miss most when I don't have internet access, but the same is true to non-electronic methods of communication. If I'm waiting for a letter, I miss the postal service on days with no delivery (and in Canada, there's no Saturday delivery.) I might not be much good with phone calls, but I miss telephone service when it's down because it means I can't make calls even if I wanted to. Whenever I go to my department to have lunch, I always hope there'll be company there, and increasingly there isn't, since there are no more classes. They're all a part of the same desire.