Boomeranged by Ricochet

Wireless Internet access from Metricom was supposed to be the future. But now I've been disconnected, forced back into my offline past.

By George Kelly

Aug. 8, 2001 | It was like food or oxygen to me, an all-consuming need. I knew what I had before it was gone; that doesn't mean I miss it any less.

It started out as a joyful amusement, a pastime I could even display a sense of decorum and reason toward. Over time, every neuron in my noggin became driven by it, my brain's chemistry kinked as if I were a laboratory rat pressing a lever in a demented experiment.

It drove me to brazenly exhibitionistic episodes in a bookshelf- and box-filled spare room in my mother's house in suburban Washington, D.C., in the back of a speeding Greyhound bus somewhere along a highway in the middle of Nebraska and even atop Seattle's Space Needle.

At home in the Bay Area, I satisfied my lust from the confines of a seat at a crowded movie premiere, in a cab zipping along San Francisco's Geary Street late at night and even idling in midday weekend stop-and-go traffic along the concrete stretch of Interstate 80 at Oakland's MacArthur Maze, where three highways merge into the interstate's last push toward the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge tollbooths.

More recently, I'd made a juvenile game out of it while riding my BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train to work in San Francisco. Leaving the system's stations at Lake Merritt or Oakland's city center, I'd board a subway car and wait for it to glide into the open air along raised tracks toward the West Oakland station. As soon as we were out, I'd see if I could take care of business in less than two-and-a-half minutes. By the time I'd grabbed a window seat, whipped it out and begun to aim for the horizon, timing my efforts to reach completion before the train began to sink below the horizon and into the Transbay Tunnel, I was often left a little breathless.

My affair with my Ricochet wireless Internet access, courtesy of Metricom, was the stuff of passion, if not love. But now, since last Friday morning when I read the news, I can see myself more clearly. Like former Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy, I can admit, at long last, that I had no sense of decency. I was in thrall to the demands of my little gray friend with the tiny antenna and the flashing-green LED on top. I can't couch it in the glowing terms of a worthwhile relationship -- you know, wholesome give and take, cuddling, late-night runs for Häagen-Dazs, long walks in the rain and all that. It's been a "monstrous beast breaking its chain" compulsion.

I never gave a thought to any of those Net at your fingertips, cellphone service providers' plans. Wireless access from a Palm, a Handspring or a BlackBerry never literally turned me on. No, the promises of flat-fee, all-you-can-eat bandwidth piped into my laptop were all I ever wanted, the siren song that sent me to sign up some three years ago. Now, post-Metricom, I have the chance at an offline life again. I know I don't have to be online all the time, anywhere, anyhow. But I'm still bereft.

Next page: The shame, the shame: Logging on from the Space Needle