Obsessions

I am obsessed with the Internet. You can say that's another of my weird obsessions. I never realized it until one day after reaching home from a weekend trip , I thought of resorting to my usual business, when to my surprise, I found that my phone was stark dead. Hearing the silence of the dial tone, I felt my heart beat stop. Usually I am indifferent to problems that occur in our house. There is always someone to take care of it. But in this case, I was on my wits end, when I found that the root cause of it was a major cable fault, which would take weeks to solve, and I was literally feeling sick by digesting this piece of information. I had never felt like this before. Now, you might think, I am exaggerating, but I think I had OCD back then.

I could have utilized my time doing stuff that I usually don't take up because of my preoccupation with Internet on other days, but I simply wasted the day piddling around. I had registered a complaint already, but when my phone showed no signs of life, I became hysterical. Another day passed by without the Internet connection. When it was no longer tolerable, I rushed to the MTNL office to personally request them to take care of the problem, as if they would leave their important work to attend my problem impressed by my personal visit. They assured me that it would be done that day itself, now that their strike was over, of which I wasn’t even aware of. But as expected, it didn't. The next day I trained my mind to stop thinking about the problem and started utilizing my time for work which did not depend on net. And the next day when I had lost all hopes of it and had given up my obsession doing "better" work and having a quality time, the phone suddenly buzzed. It was my friend. I had a chat and after I hung up, the reality struck me. It was like my life was getting back on track again. I was so happy to see the two monitor’s icon glowing brightly back at me from the status bar. Then I wondered how inured my life is to these things. How uncomfortable they can make a person with its absence. But at the same time I realized, that rational thinking can help you get over it.

The moral of the story: Don't let your life depend on someone or something so much, that it becomes a habit. If at all you do, then make sure, that thing does not ruin your life by disappearing or acting weird all of a sudden. In the worst case, if that thing does end up ruining your life, then think rationally about what better things you can do without it and by thinking if it really deserved that much attention. If you fail at that too, then god help you!