Disaster but still in contact

THE EDITOR: Although the floods last month reached the level of a national disaster, our people actually avoided the worst effects of a natural disaster.

While there is no gainsaying that the authorities fell down on the job (and from all reports are continuing to do so in the aftermath), the first and foremost fact is that no lives were lost.

What I also found notable was that communications remained functional – indeed, far more than functional, since I read that TSTT teams actually went out to flood shelters and installed free Wi-Fi for the people there. I imagine that just being able to keep in contact with loved ones, or just to take their minds off their plight by surfing media, was a great psychological boost.

In that context, it occurred to me that nowadays nobody is really out of electronic communications for long, if at all. In my childhood, if your phone (supplied by State-owned Telco) went down, you might have to wait weeks, even months, before it was repaired.

If you needed to make a call you had to go by the neighbour (assuming their phone wasn’t down as well) and pay them for use, since calls were expensive. Your only other alternative was to get a bag of 25-cent pieces and go find a payphone which hadn’t been vandalised.

Nowadays, I don’t think anyone waits more than a few days for their landline to be fixed on the rare occasions it stops working (I have always had a TSTT phone, live in central and never had my phone down longer than a week). And, in the interim, you can use your mobile phone, and that network is also rarely down, at least in central.

I think most people just take such things for granted, which is why what we consider inconveniences are so inconvenient precisely because we are accustomed to ease in everything nowadays.

CB GOBIN via e-mail