EThere are situations in life that require all of a person’s inner calm and discipline, which are so nerve-wracking and grueling, so oppressive that you need the patience of a piece of paper to cope with them. These situations put every path in the nervous costume to the test. Years later we still remember them and ask ourselves: How did I do it? In these situations there is nothing else to do than: Wait. You probably guessed it: It’s a quarter to eight on a Monday evening, I’m on an ICE, and Instagram is down. I’m calling a friend and colleague to tell her about my day. She presses around “Grade is bad”. In the background I hear her friend ask: “Do we want to open the Ahrwein?” We hang up. I look out the window, pick up my phone and open Instagram. Not possible, that’s right.
The evening reminds me a little of the time when I logged out of Twitter for a few weeks and set parental controls on Instagram. After 15 minutes of fun a day, my cell phone said: Your Instagram limit has been reached for today. When I told my colleagues about it in the Sunday newspaper, cheers broke out: “Write a text about your waiver, Johanna !!” – “Isn’t that a bit worn out?” – “Not with you!” I should, I thought, myself probably worry if my colleagues find it so extraordinary that I no longer hang out in digital worlds for many hours every day.
I write text messages like a teenager back then
And that’s usually what I like to do pretty much: you wonder why Kim Kardashian looks the way she looks? I can tell you which plastic surgery according to some California experts she had because I follow various beauty docs explaining celebrity faces. Want to know which lipstick line Rihanna has just released? I know that too, of course. But to do justice to the whole thing: I also follow many news accounts that process information, accounts of activists and politicians, my feed is almost as mixed as life (please do not compare forrest-gump-chocolate boxes at this point!) Somewhere I read that the Facebook / Instagram employees no longer even come into their offices. “Not just you!” I think dramatically and mechanically open Instagram for the hundredth time to look at a profile that has not been loaded for the hundredth time. My last WhatsApp message doesn’t arrive either. I write a text message like I did when I was a teenager.
On Twitter, the journalist elite make silly jokes about the instalockdown. At this moment, for reasons inexplicable to me, I am following many intellectuals, and of course they all make fun of themselves, according to the motto: read a book! How can you suffer from an Instagram lockdown? Yes, you ride the ICE and you forgot your train book, you smart ones !, I think rather angry. Of course I could also read the newspaper or the news, but I did that all day for work and therefore didn’t feel like it. At some point I find myself starting again with the candy crush version, which is actually too difficult for me.
Blessed, I think, are those who don’t even notice this Lockdown 2.0 – and think jealously of the colleague who has just opened a bottle of wine with her boyfriend and is now probably cuddling on the sofa while my lost and rather unhappy soul is in a slightly chilled ICE, in which four out of five toilets are broken, two men pollute an entire compartment with beer flag and kebab and the air conditioning air is so dry that a pimple is just sprouting under my FFP2 mask.
In the meantime, I’ve opened the Instagram app so often and stared at an empty profile that I’ve had to exceed my current limit (30 minutes a day) several times. Twitter welcomes the digitally stranded on Twitter (haha): “Hello literally everyone!” McDonald’s responds on Twitter. I blink. I read something on Facebook, but I deleted that from my phone years ago. Lights move past the train window in the dark, and the small light that is my cell phone screen flashes pleasantly in the mirror image. When you have nothing to do, you are automatically caught up in your own thoughts, and I think that after a day at work my thoughts really don’t shine as brightly as my smartphone screen. My boss writes me an email: “Have you seen? Instagram is down! ”- (Have you seen it? Haha!) -“ Are you writing a text? ”I look at my mobile phone screen again, then mirrored on the screen in the window, then into my empty head. “Okay,” I reply. Then I’ll start.
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