My 24 hour abstinence from internet and email

Well I had to admit that the assignment of abstinence of the internet couldn’t have come at a better time. I will explain why in a moment however let me give you a quick rundown of a normal week of internet use for myself.

Work Life:
I work full time Monday through Friday at an accounting office. I hold the official title at the office as the office administrator. My duties include returning emails and voicemails and communicating with clients. Our office and clients are accustomed to using and communicating via email as it is usually the quickest way for us to get answers to questions and scheduling taken care. Our office also subscribes to a service which takes our voice mail messages and transcribes them into email. It is my duty to read the voice messages and then decide how that information will be dispersed through the proper person to take care of the client. We came upon this service as an attempt to better serve our clients in a timely manner. Before we subscribed to this service I was checking voice mail hourly. Now the voicemails are delivered to my email account and I can monitor them to see how quickly they need to be dealt with. It has saved me hours of listening to phone messages. Along with those duties I also do other work with computer software including bookkeeping and accounting work.

School:
I am a full time student at OSU Cascades and as many of you know that attend the Cascade Campus the classes that are available to us in an in class setting are limited. Specifically I am a senior and am working on a Liberal Studies degree. I normally try to take at least three credits on campus but normally most of my classes are online. In taking online classes I find myself on Blackboard almost everyday to see if there is any new information that I need to know. I spend most nights and weekends completing school work as I do not have time during the daytime. Most weekends are spent with at least one day online completing and turning in assignments.

Leisure:
Well as you can see I spend a great deal of time on the internet for work and school. Therefore I do not spend a lot of my leisure time in front of a computer. I do not belong to the popular sites that gather friends and family such as MySpace, Face book, Classmates, etc. Generally in my leisure time I do check a personal email account however there is almost never any mail their. My friends and family call me to get together. We do not normally converse via email. I do however have internet access at home. Primarily I use it for school however my family and I do enjoy having the resource at home to check movie times, definition and research on subjects that we are interested in. We use the internet a lot to gain knowledge for example the other day we wanted to know what type of lizard it was that my 11 year-old found while on a hike.

THE DAY OF ABSTINENCE: Now that I have told you about my normal routine I would like to talk about the day of abstinence. In discovering that I needed to complete this assignment I immediately began to think about when I could possibly do it without hurting my job or school performance for the week. It became clear to me that this was the perfect week because in starting classes I had smaller amounts of homework which could easily be done before the time of abstinence. On Friday night my husband asked me what I wanted to do this weekend. I mentioned to him that I would just like to check out of life for the day. We decided that camping sounded like a fun time and the weather however not beautiful was good enough to camp at a nearby river. In leaving home we left the phone that had internet access because I would not receive service where we were anyway. We are very lucky living in Central Oregon because we are known for outdoor living and recreation. Normally on weekends we find a day to check out of our normal routine to take our son and dogs to somewhere beautiful to relax. Before we left I called my mother to let her know where we had planned to camp and told her that I would call her when I returned home. At that point we only planned to use the cell phone in the case of emergency so we brought it along just in case. So for 24 hours I made it without checking email or going on the internet but I had to remove myself from the situation of being tempted to use it. I do not think that if I was at home the task would have been so easy. I am at some level reliant on the internet for my communication. I choose to live in Bend for the outdoor recreation but I also give up many opportunities that the students who live on the main campus because it is a necessity to take online classes if I ever want to graduate. In some ways the internet is an important tool for me to communicate with others no matter where I live or do. I guess that is the beauty of the online forum any one anywhere can join in the conversation.