Staying Connected

I think, sometimes, about the great fortune of being an expat in the modern era. It wasn't so far back that international phone calls were something only a Rockefeller could entertain, and really, not that long ago that correspondences sailed on a slow boat because Al Gore had not yet invented email.

I have two favorite inventions for staying connected to the U.S. The technology of both baffles my mind, and keeps me eternally grateful.

First is the Skype phone. Of course there is computer Skype, which is groovy for video calls, but I found a few limitations with computer-Skype: a lot of people at home are still intimidated by this amorphous Skype-thing and don't use it, the call-quality remains inconsistent at best, and I hate having to stay in front of my computer for long chats. I love the Skype phone because it is a regular handset and I get an American phone number. And, for me, the quality of the calls is immeasurably better. I still think that it is some kind of spell conjuring that my mom in Georgia can just dial me with a 10-digit number, as if I were in the States, and it rings to a handset. (You can get Skype calls forwarded to a smartphone, as well, but I've never made it work on my Android.). While we're on the subject of phone dates, I'll mention my favorite website, which allows you to put in two time zones, and compares times side by side. I find this so much easier than trying to do the math and trying to remember which of us is/is not in daylight savings. It's a sanity saver for me.

The other innovation of witchcraft and wizardry is the Virtual Private Network (VPN). A lot of American media is restricted in Australia, which is a real bummer when all of your friends at home are posting on Facebook about the return of 30 Rock and gushing about season 2 of Downton Abbey. For a small monthly fee, VPN subscribers have access to an American IP address, which means that one could - ehem - theoretically do things like (legally) subscribe to an online streaming movie service and, I don't know, spend the whole day in my one's pajamas watching American TV and movies that are out on DVD in the U.S., but not even released here. I mean, in theory, we could do that with a VPN. I cannot confirm or deny whether I spent the entire day today watching Parks and Recreation and listening to Pandora. If I had, I can tell you, it would have been a dream of a day.

Perhaps in the future, expats will look back to today and feel lucky that they did not live in an era before superspeed transport, allowing them to get back to the U.S. in less than an hour, but until that day, I think that we who are far away from home live in fortunate times.