I’m so glad to exist in this period of history.
I can’t even imagine living in an earlier generation, where you couldn’t pull up your phone to ask a random medical question, track down your friends in real time with GPS, or check your weather conditions at home from hundreds of miles away.
All of these advancements truly make life easier and so much more informative. However, there are some major pitfalls with how technologically linked our lives are these days. It turns out that when one technology is highly reliant on another, it really can bring the whole system down. This is exactly what happened last week when a big storm blew through and disrupted our thermostat programming at home. You see, we recently had a smart thermostat installed with our HVAC program, and we didn’t exactly know how it operated yet. It was working fine, supplying us with fresh and cool air inside, despite the heavy, hot and humid air outside. As this massive storm blew through, we suffered a power outage and suddenly the AC stopped. As the power flickered back on, we realized that the new smart thermostat had gone offline; it was no longer connected to the home wifi or the AC unit. We decided that the only way to reconnect the temperature control panel with the air handling equipment was to use the app. However, when we attempted to access the smart thermostat application, we realized that it wasn’t working either. The storm had knocked down a cable line, leaving us without working Wifi. We couldn’t access the app, locate a wifi signal, or connect our thermostat to the air conditioning system manually. In the end, we were stranded without any indoor temperature control for three days thanks to modern technology.
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