Disconnected Weekend Assignment

When Professor Downey explained this assignment in lecture I knew from the get go that I would not be able to stick to it very successfully. The timing for this assignment was unfortunate for me because I had a programming project for a computer science class due on Monday, and I had to be on call over the weekend for my work (I do remote programming for a defense contractor) as we were having a large site launch and if any problems were to pop up I would have to be able to deal with them right away. With these things in mind I had to modify the rules for myself quite a bit to have any chance of participating at all. I ended up challenging myself to go without Social Media and non-work-related cell phone use for the weekend rather than going completely without a computer as that would have been impossible for me. I started at 5pm on Friday by logging out of all of my social media and non-work-related accounts. With this being Halloween weekend I knew that having plans made before disconnecting would be important so I made arrangements to meet up with some friends later on Friday. I spent Friday with those friends and had no real issues with my disconnections at all. I spent a large portion of Saturday on a computer working on my Computer Science project and monitoring the work situation but made sure that I had no social media accounts enabled at all. When it came close to time to meet up with friends for the night I realized that I had no way to contact anyone to see where I should meet or what the plans were. I ended up just going over to my friend's apartment in hopes that he would be there, and luckily he was so I was able to get through Saturday while being disconnected as well. On Sunday I started out continuing to try hard to be successful with the challenge but I ultimately failed later that day. I realized that I had to send in an email as part of the submission part of my project and there was absolutely no other way for me to complete that without going back into my school email. After doing this assignment I realized just how dependent on technology I am today. My work is all done completely on a computer and there is absolutely no way around that, and this is the same with many of my classes (especially computer science classes). Without computers as we have them today my entire major would be structured differently and my job would not even be possible.