You never really understand just how dependent (read: addicted) you are to something until you are forced to be cut off from said “thing” for an extended period of time.

Case in point: for the past two weeks, my workplace has blocked social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This has likely been done in an effort to increase productivity, not amongst the regular workforce, but rather for the ~50 college-age interns we have working for us this summer in various functional capacities around the company. I say this because the same thing occurred last year at roughly this time, and the block was removed once all the kids went back to school. But honestly, for all I know, this is now a permanent change, and the fall will see nothing lifted but a slight drain on the network as the interns vacate the premises in an orderly fashion. I don’t work in that part of IT, so I really can’t say one way or another.

Sure, I have access to those sites on my phone, but it’s slow and cumbersome to use a phone to surf the web. So I don’t do that very often, and when I do, it’s only for a couple of minutes. More importantly, it’s been interesting to see how my addiction to social networking sites has affected me now that everything has been blocked.

Twitter has simply disappeared from my radar completely. I don’t check it, I don’t post to it, and even when I have unblocked access to the internet at home, I don’t bother to even load up the site. It has just vanished from my periphery, and I can’t say that I miss it all that much. There was a lot of interesting things to read there from a myriad of interesting sources, but what would at first be intended as a quick perusal would easily culminate in 20-30 minutes lost to the wastelands of time.

Facebook has been a tougher beast. I still post status updates periodically, through text messages. But what I miss most are the status updates of my close friends and family. My favorite feature of Facebook is the ability to quickly and easily share photos and articles with friends, and I find myself spending quite a bit of time when I get home from work just catching up on what I missed during the day.

And playing Scrabble. My family and I have been hooked on that lately. I take that as my guilty pleasure. Which graphically demonstrates just how lame my life is that I consider a word game a guilty pleasure.

But what I really miss more than anything is the feeling of connection to the outside world. I find myself at work sometimes wandering into other people’s offices at random moments throughout the day just to chat and connect with fellow human beings. When I was able to freely converse on social sites, I felt like there was a world outside the walls of my office. Now, I feel a nagging need to get some face-time with various people in order to remind myself that my existence is not confined to a desk, a chair, and computer screen. I honestly don’t know if this is a good or bad turn of events; I suppose that would be a question one would have to ask the co-workers that I’m harassing daily.

Overall, I think the blockage is a good thing. Productivity is up, mainly because I don’t feel constantly distracted by something happening in my web browser. I feel like my connection to the outside world has suffered slightly, but I can make up for that by forming more meaningful human connections in my daily life.

So, yeah. Is it fall yet?