A modern-day nightmare swept greater Miami-Dade yesterday afternoon. AT&T's 3G cell service completely ceased to work, leaving thousands of iPhone and other smartphone addicts without on-the-go access to their precious, precious Twitters, Foursquare and Words With Friends. The unimaginable horror was almost too much to bear. We're frankly just relieved no one died or was seriously injured during the great 3G outage.
Authorities aren't sure exactly how many stupid Tweets about meaningless little micro-thoughts went untwatted, or how many Angry Birds went un-launched. How many Hipstamatic photos of digitally degraded stop signs went unshared. How many restaurant visits went un-Insta-Yelped. Sure, life in the city went on otherwise. There were no hitches caused in the actual Miami-Dade mayoral race for example, but think about how many races for Foursquare mayorships were forever altered. Yeah, you just think about that.
The thought of having to actually fully engage with our surroundings without the option of disappearing into the warm glow of our iPhone screen to text a friend brought nothing but anxiety and despair. We tried desperately to figure out if we could update our Facebook statuses by smoke signal to no avail. Occasionally, we thought, "We should totally update our Tumblrs about our phones being out," only to be faced with the chilling reminder that we could not do so until we returned home, safely back to the digital embrace of our broadband-connected laptops.
Luckily, service was returned shortly before 10 p.m., but we'll never again get to waste those precious three hours by mindlessly thumbing our phones. Three hours of non-life we'll never get back.
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