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Issue #207 October 2007
The Law of Unintended Consequences
by Steve Ciarcia
The Law of Unintended Consequences says that every undertaking, however well intentioned, is generally accompanied by unforeseen consequences. As well meaning as our intentions are in passing laws, starting projects, or instilling goodness, because of the complexity of the world and our usual overconfidence, no good deed goes unpunished.
A significant example of such consequences is the Internet. Invented in the early 1970s as a more efficient means for international academic communications, the Internet was immediately embraced by everyone with little regard for structural securities. E-mail was developed with virtually no safeguards because everyone on the Internet knew each other. False headers? Anonymous originators? Cryptic subject lines specifically designed to avoid filters? Why would anyone want to do that? BTW, what is an e-mail filter and why would we even need it? That naivety has resulted in many of the Internet consequences we face today.
Like many things in our lives, we understand its significance only when it is no longer available. We don’t realize how much we need a car until ours is in the shop. We don’t appreciate electricity until a natural disaster kicks us back into 1880s settler mode without power. Unfortunately, we can’t stock “extra Internet” on the shelves for emergencies.
I recently had a little taste of web-less living for a day and a half and I’ll tell you it wasn’t pretty. All morning I was having intermittent service problems and at about noon my home office DSL line went belly-up. A quick check of the four landlines into the house (yes, still four, and I’m not exactly sure why I need that many) revealed that two were working, one was totally dead, and one was all static. The latter was my DSL line. A frantic call to AT&T resulted in a repair truck pulling into my driveway about three hours later.
Of course, with four hours of my life already on hold, I was getting a bit antsy. I missed the constant stream of e-mails from the office, real-time updates of news events, webcams and monitors at the cottage, VoIP conference calls with editors and friends, and just plain surfing. More significantly, however, I think I was suffering from withdrawal from the adrenaline high that comes when dealing with such an attention-addictive device.
At first, the AT&T repairman said that the buried line from my house to the telephone pole might be bad. He couldn’t string a temporary wire or swap out the DSL wire with one of the two lines that did work. I’d have to wait up to a week for their “wiring contractor” to bury a new wire. Being antsy didn’t even come close to describing the horror caused by that explanation.
I went back and sat down in front of my laptop and just stared at the blank IE7 page. A little while later, I was on my way out to the garage to fire up the backhoe when the AT&T guy drove back into the driveway. I had already concluded that waiting a week wasn’t going to happen. I was going to dig up the damn line and patch it myself. “If they want to bury it all again next week, that’s fine,” I thought to myself. “I’ve dug more holes on this property than the moles. I just have to watch out for the power line buried in the same utility trench.” ;-)
I was ready to do some real diesel-powered damage when the repairman matter-of-factly said that it seemed like it was a wire from the pole back to the DSL box a half-mile down the road instead of to the house. He said they would let me know the following day if it could be fixed within 24 hours or whether it would be a job for their “pole wiring” contractor that could take another week. My communications-withdrawal symptoms only worsened as he drove out.
At 2 P.M. the next afternoon, my anxiety wasn’t any better. Having lots of land is fine until you need to hack the neighbor’s Wi-Fi and that wasn’t happening either. I was still dead in the water and staring at the IE white screen of “duh!” So, I decided to call AT&T and see if they had made any progress. After 20 minutes of automated DTMF Q&A and three live operators, I ended up with the repair department. Since a “repair ticket” was still open at their end, they concluded that work must still be proceeding. I never got to ask what “proceeding” meant because at that moment another AT&T truck pulled into my driveway. I quickly signed off and went to meet the repairman.
“Well, we had a little burned spot in the wiring a quarter mile down the road a piece. It should be fixed in about a half hour. You guys get a little thunderstorm action around here every once in a while?” he asked.
I pointed at one of my out buildings and traced a finger line from it across the tops of a few more out buildings and ended up pointing to the top of the main house as I said, “Nothing that hundreds of pounds of 0.5" braided copper cable and 24 lightning rods along with buried braided cable around every foundation connected together as a 1-acre ground plane doesn’t fix! I guess AT&T got the lightning bolt that missed me.” He got the message.
A half hour later my life resumed schedule as all of my communication-intensive activities came back into sync. I turned on Outlook and e-mail messages streamed in. And, for the first time in my life, I didn’t even mind getting a little spam.
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