A Life Without WiFi

As if being cooped up at home hiding out from a worldwide pandemic wasn’t bad enough…

internet users across Singapore experienced a full day’s disruption over StarHub’s broadband services recently.

How It Affected Our Lives During Circuit Breaker

For us, being in the middle of sorting through a major relocation from Singapore to Canada, there were major online errands to run. Accounts to set up and close. Bills to pay. Jobs to apply for. Video interviews to be had. Social channels to update. A working internet connection serves as our umbilical cord to the outside world. Suddenly, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom and all overseas calls were unavailable to us. It was bad. Everything grinded to a sudden halt.

And so, we’ve had to follow suit. We slowed our lives down.

We do realise that we are among the privileged few. Even with our online lives put on hold, essential offline services remain up and running. Water, electricity (air-con) and gas are still in place. Our fridge is well stocked. We weren’t about to starve. Even during these trying times, we couldn’t think of a better place to self isolate than from the comforts of our cozy home.

With the hours merging together, from nights to days, we’ve lost count of the copious amount of coffee and wine we’ve had. Add that to the luxury of falling asleep many times over to old war movies (Darkest Hour, The Coldest Game) on Netflix.

Unless you’ve been living under a cave, you’ve probably heard of Netflix. They have been the go-to for a while with their impressive catalogue of old movies and newer originals.

Netflix’s algorithm automatically selects the quality of your stream depending on your internet connectivity. So on a slow day, you might get a shitty ass standard definition (SD) stream at 720 x 480 pixels instead of a 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels) or HD (1920 x 1080) quality level stream. These days, even YouTube on the laptop is HD quality. A good hack we are fond of employing is to pre-download entire movies beforehand. With this, we were able to rely on a backlog of pre-downloaded films even without the internet.

Even our dog gets into the Netflix & Chill.

(Not that version. Get your mind out the gutter…)

Home Alone

Being caught in the crosshairs of Covid-19 also meant that numerous countries' borders were fast closing, affecting our plans to relocate from Singapore to Canada. Two days before our flight out, Canada announced a temporary border closing to stem the flow of external Covid carriers. We were shut out and left scrambling. Eventually, in the weeks that followed, new directives were rolled out exempting special classes of visa holders like ourselves. The plan was back on track but it was tough finding an airline that would take us through a country that permits non-citizens from transiting. With many fleets of aircraft carriers grounded globally, our options to get out of Singapore were fast diminishing. On top of the constantly fluid situation, we also had to deal with an airline pet embargo. Flying out with our pet dog was nearly impossible.

This has been a huge curveball to say the least, but we are adapting and rolling with it. We tell ourselves that we just have to keep going. Because inertia is the enemy.

Albert Einstein - “Nothing happens until something moves.”

Keep Going

Like all things in life, having a goal to work towards is electrifying and exciting. But no matter how much we want it, if we sit on it, it turns cold. Momentum is energy. The minute it wanes, vision fogs and we start doubting what we're doing.

So we drew up a list of things we can do offline in this strange new world. Every little thing helps push the needle, so that we are proactively working towards winding down our lives in Singapore and landing in Canada.

So here it is -

4 things you can do for your Mind, Body & Soul in an offline world

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PSA: If you’re a StarHub user whose internet connection was affected in the outage, do yourself a favour by registering for a 20% monthly fee rebate - their way of saying “Sorry, we screwed up.”

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