Wi-Fi Woes
The signal drops and the world shrinks to the size of my frustration,
Everything I need to know, every tiny dopamine hit, now stranded behind a spinning wheel,
Netflix frozen mid-episode, the characters’ faces twisted in digital agony,
I’m left wondering if the apocalypse would feel worse than watching a stream stutter and die,
We used to blame the weather, the cable, the neighbors stealing bandwidth–now it’s just fate,
Pacing the room, clutching my phone like a relic, as if staring at empty bars could conjure up a miracle.
I used to laugh at old folks with their stories of dial-up, now I’d sell my soul for a steady two bars,
I’m forced to confront my own uselessness, realizing I don’t know my passwords,
I can’t stream, can’t meme, can’t scream into the void–hell, I can’t even remember how to read a book.
I try resetting the router, the sacred ritual–unplug, wait, replug, pray–
Call tech support and repeat the script I could recite in my sleep,
But their voice is as robotic as the error code, and nothing changes except my growing sense of doom.
Life on pause–no updates, no news, no pointless scrolling,
I’m left with myself, and that’s the scariest lag of all,
It’s like waking up naked in a crowded mall, exposed and unsure how to function.
The world outside keeps spinning, but my universe is buffer, buffer, fail,
How did we get so fragile, so chained to a signal,
That a little lost Wi-Fi means existential crisis, an identity derailed?
I could step outside, try a walk, talk to a neighbor, but that’s admitting defeat,
Instead, I sit in digital silence, praying to invisible gods for a notification or a blessed ping,
Anything to prove I’m still alive, still part of the current,
Because in this wired world, without connection, I might as well be a ghost in my own apartment.
When the bars come back, relief hits like a drug,
Notifications explode, as if the world missed me–truth is, nobody noticed,
Still, I scroll like a junkie just to feel real,
Tell myself next time I’ll be stronger, but I know I won’t–
Wi-Fi woes aren’t just first world–they’re the only world I know.