Death By Dongle

25th Jan 2012

There are many things more irritating than a slow internet connection. A tooth ache, getting clamped and stepping in dog poo is another. Along with that you have more collective irritants such as paying tax so the government can hand it to a load of unsecure foreign bond holders and being told to pay even more tax by some small French feen in a suit.

Slow internet, as much as it pretends to be a thing of the past for those in cities and large towns is still a reality for many Corkonians and profoundly irritating. We know it from looking at detailed analytics of visitors to our own humble piece of cyber real estate.

Majella gets another ten seconds of a Youtube Beyoncé video from her dongle.

A large number of people in Cork are still coping with 1MB connections to their laptops but more recently with the explosion of smartphones decent bandwidth to download a video is as hard to acquire as an All-Ireland final ticket in Bantry on the third Saturday in September.

Dongles are still around and many students along with others renting apartments still stick with them as a financially cheaper option to the terror of giving your bank details to a cable company who may still bleeding your bank account dry long after you’ve moved on and made thirty phone calls to a sympathetic but irrelevant call centre employee in Bangalore.

At times, mobile dongles can be so feebly slow that it may seem preferable that a postman would deliver a large encyclopaedia size tome the following day with a thousand pages of ones and zeroes which you would then type into your computer to create the twenty seconds of video you want to view instead of waiting for the clip to download to your phone or the dongle tethered to your computer to trump up the digital flicks.

'Swap you 5MB for your soul bubbila'

The frustration of a snail slow internet connection is compounded by your powerlessness to do anything about it but most of us still perform a wide variety of mystic rituals in an apparent effort to please the Internet Gods so that they may deliver unto us sufficient daily bytes to satisfy our digital temptations.

These futile actions have absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever but if a video plays for a few seconds after you have just blown warm breath on the dongle or made the sign of the cross over it then there’s no reason not to try it again and again until your clip is fully loaded - even if it seems as silly as touching wood every time you say the phrase.

Dingle: one letter short and nearly as silly

Such desperate routines may include holding a phone aloft above head height badly imitating the enormous telephone mast up in Farranree (rumoured to be the highest in the world according to locals) or only clicking on a Youtube video when your computer is held aloft through a velux roof light.

You may also find yourself waving your device around as if to catch the tiny spurts of signal as they saunter in through the walls into your gaf like an elderly ghost after a few pints. Going to a certain side of the house is another favourite or maybe you’re just convinced the reception is always bad when your flatmate is having a shower.

Don’t rule out roaring at your device either. While the noticeable effects of screaming blue murder at a piece of plastic may not be in anyway empirically measurable it can certainly help remedy the air-punching excruciation of those ever present, patronising icons and symbols designed to tell you that whatever it is your waiting for is on the way. Oh and by the way “we” are busy so it’ll be a while.

At times when you look back at your entire internet experience it seems that spending time starring helplessly at egg timers, swirly balls, ticking clocks and other progress meters may have been a worryingly large slice of our experience.  

Sometimes a miraculous burst of content streams its way into your retinas and for a moment you are lulled into believing you are in a normal western country like France where domestic internet speeds of 100MB are common (just imagine it – so fast that videos download before you know you want to watch them!). You immerse yourself in the intrigue of a hurling documentary, the scandal of what Dublin bankers have done to Ireland or the excitement of match highlights…

Then! Just as Simon Zebo is about to receive the ball and score his first triumphant try of three, he and other Munster rugby stars turn into something resembling a badly built Lego airport.

The swirly symbol appears again to let you know that your pitiful and paltry mobile network is, in fact, reconsidering its decision to allow you to see highlights of the historic Heineken Cup victory over Northampton Saints.

Then begins the queue of mystic charms and superstitious rituals to try to gather sufficient kilobytes around your computer to form a coherent picture.

Then you have to decide whether a frozen picture accompanied by nonchalantly proceeding match commentary is better than nothing at all or if moving a large vase from the window sill while gently tapping your smartphone against the glass in the hope of plamásing the internet into your home is worth the risk of your neighbours thinking you’re a little eccentric.