The Internet Saved Me

The internet saved me.

I'm chronically disorganized, distracted, and shy. I stumbled through years of missteps and crises large and small due to these deficits, before the internet was born and grew up. Online tools helped me work around them. Let me count the ways, or at least scrape the surface:

1. Online bill pay -- dear lords, the bills I would lose in the old snail-mail days. Even after opening, reading, writing the check, putting it all in an envelope, stamping it and setting it near the house keys to mail as soon as there were funds to cover it... it could still go astray. And be forgotten. And therefore late, with the usual tail effects of fees and diminished credit rating. Now I can schedule the payment weeks before it's needed, and that bill is simply taken care of.  Thank you, internet. Thank you.

2. Online task management -- a to-do list isn't remotely useful when you've misplaced it. But a virtual to-do list is always there. Sure, I used Word and Notepad and any other software that could handle text laid out in a list. But those lists were unavailable when I wasn't on my own PC. (Yes, this was pre-Google Docs.) I still haven't found the perfect productivity tool for me -- suggestions welcomed! -- but my days of forgetting, for example, to register to vote or send a birthday card to my niece are a thing of the past. Bless you, internet.

3. Online budget and financial management tools -- I'm looking at you, Mint, with stops at Personal Capital, Yodlee, and a few others on the way. We're not back to our strict budget standards still, but that's absolutely my fault, because those tools were how we managed it the first time, those tools let Spouse see the big picture I couldn't adequately describe, and those tools let me Money like a grown-up for the first time in my life, at far-too-advanced an age. I owe you, internet.

4. That old information superhighway -- for everything. It's hard to look up information in the physical world: the library closes at 6, before you have time to get there; the physical world is filled with other people, whose presence in any numbers feels like a cattle prod approaching your skin; and so often you need to look up stuff to narrow what you're looking for, over and over, until you sieve out the information you need. Enter internet. Ask the search engine. Check several sites against each other, to be sure you understand and to verify the info. Follow the links those sites give you to get even more information. Repeat until adequately, or thoroughly, informed. Internet, you are miraculous.

I believe it's not an exaggeration to say that, without the internet, we would be less financially secure, and absolutely more anxious. Thanks for being in my corner, internet.

But if you want to do more -- well, like Harold Finch, I have a list. There are a few areas you've neglected. For starters, where's my Corner Gas/Schitt's Creek crossover fanfic, in which Brett Leroy and David Rose find themselves in the same town and mysteriously compelled to one another? Get on that, internet. Get. On. It.