Computer Trouble?!?

Being quarantined sounds pretty scary. The word conjures up images of leprosy-infected people being rounded up and sent off to some distant tropical island to bask in their sickness. Well, I myself have been quarantined, but not quite like that. You remember the thing you got at the beginning of this year (or whenever) in the dorms saying that you had definitely better not get a virus or we’ll cut off the internet to your room and your roommate will suffer too and it will be DAYS until you’re hooked back up because you’re so dumb for getting a virus in the first place? Yeah, I didn’t really pay attention to that either. I knew my computer probably had quite a bit of spyware on it, but that didn’t really concern me. Once I had made it all the way until finals week of second semester, I was pretty sure people didn’t actually get quarantined. It was something scary Housing threatened you with, but wouldn’t actually follow through on. I was wrong.

My roommate and I were sitting in our room around midnight on a boring Saturday night, doing homework and whatever when the internet on both of our computers stopped working. We knew something was up, and the scary screen telling us that someone had a virus and that we’d been quarantined confirmed our suspicions. After a couple hours of virus-scanning, we found out that the virus was on my roommate’s computer. After spending a torturous Sunday with no internet, we went down to the lab to see if the NetTech was there to hook us back up. He was definitely supposed to be there, but he never showed up. After making a phone call to official NetTech headquarters, it looks like we won’t have internet in the room for at least a couple days. Great.

The thought of not having internet for that long seems kind of daunting, but it's actually surprising how liberating it can be, as well as how productive it can make you. I’ve actually been getting a lot of my homework done, studying for finals, and doing all kinds of other things that don't involve Facebook. I’ve gone on walks, studied on the quad for hours and actually read for fun in the last day, and while I probably would have done all of these anyway, it’s a lot easier to do them when your number one time-waster has been taken away. I’ve found that you never really realize how easy it is to throw away your time on the internet until it isn’t there, and also how easy it is to find other, better, things to do once it’s gone. Maybe we should all get quarantined a little more often, for our own good.
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James Vandeberg
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Journalism
Business