A few times in the past months, I have been the victim of a loss of my e-mail service. This has happened with two providers that I have used and it seems like I can't escape the experience. In both cases I could not use the service for over twenty (20) hours. Now I'm a grown man and my reactions to these events caused me some concern. I was like a baby. I became irritable, moody and downright depressed. It was like someone took away something of mine and I couldn't do anything about getting it back. I did everything I was supposed to do to gain some feeling of control and loose the sense of being helpless to no avail. I found myself thinking of ways to avoid this predicament in the future from opening a 'back-up' email account on another service to using a friends account. I couldn't believe the almost frantic feeling that I was experiencing due to the fact that I was unable to retrieve my e-mail. What was going on in my life that caused that reaction. After all I wasn't conducting a business with my on line account. My future didn't depend on downloading the "important" mail waiting for me. I had visions of stacks of messages piling up since I couldn't download them.

I even thought of phoning potential senders and advising them of my dilemma until I realized that they would probably just laugh at me since anything they would send would certainly have little or no urgency.

I started to remember other times that I experienced the 'dependency' panic. Prior to becoming addicted to the Web, I had the daily paper delivered to my home. There were times when I expected the paper to be sitting on my driveway and it wasn't. I felt like something horrible had happened. How could I rectify the situation? I was angry at the delivery service for causing me to question their reliability. Actually, I didn't realize that I had become dependent on them to do continue doing what they had been doing. Any change of the routine sent me into a 'tail spin'. How could they do that to me?

Through my experience of not being able to access my e-mail, I have realized that there are many areas of my life that I have become quietly dependent upon and any loss of what I have become used to will cause a certain 'panic' feeling that is certainly uncomfortable to experience. Nobody ever warned me of this sneaking dependency? How Come?