We Interrupt This Blog To Bring You An Earthquake

Aaron Singh -- The earthquake near Taiwan that occurred on the Tuesday after Christmas, clocking a 7.1 on the Richter scale, meant many things to many people. To Taiwanese residents, the earth under which they had walked all their lives, secure in its fixedness, suddenly betrayed them, shaking buildings, killing two people and injuring at least 42 more, according to this BBC report. To people all over the rest of Asia, the severing of underwater communications cables meant they were cut off from one another. Businesses went into panic, governments scrambled to contain the crisis, and banks rushed to make sure their foreign trading activity was not affected.

And in the midst of it all, somewhere in a sleepy town north of the capital of Malaysia, one lone medic was typing away at his computer when suddenly an error message popped up and ruins his day.

"Connection Lost. Retry?"

Naturally, the hapless medic retries. Of course he’s going to. In fact, he retries some 30 or 40 times. But the modem isn’t even listening. One of its distant cousins somewhere on the floor of the South China Sea is in trouble, possibly even severed, so it’s definitely not going to stick around so some medic can update his blog. Oh no. It’s already packed its bags and rushed off onto the Fibre Optic Superhighway to see what it can do.

And so it is that my blog entries are a little late. Whilst Malaysia wasn’t directly affected by the earthquake, Internet connectivity in some areas was disrupted, and sluggish at best. My thoughts go out to not only the people directly affected in Taiwan, but to those around the rest of Asia who suffered more serious consequences that I did due to the loss of communications. Just goes to show how we’re all connected in this day and age, and how we don’t need to be physically affected by a disaster for our livelihoods to be disrupted anymore.