It FEELS Personal
A good friend who is also a psychologist often talked about how things FEEL personal even when they are not.
• When your best friend betrays your deep dark secret to another friend because she lacks self confidence and it made her feel important for a couple seconds
• When your young wife sleeps with your brother because after two babies she wants to feel exciting and attractive and young again
• When your brother uses drugs again, after you paid for rehab and he swore up and down he would never never use again
• When your father divorces your mother and leaves her to raise the kids alone
• When your oldest friend in the world stops returning your calls and communicating with you and you later learn that she if fighting a losing battle with cancer
• When your aging husband buys a small red convertible and turns you in for a younger model, too, because he wants to think he’s hot
• When your internet phone service is declared illegal and gets shut down to spare “government wastage”
In every case above, the situation has more to do with personal issues than with you, but man, it sure FEELS personal. The fact that is doesn’t have to do with you is almost insulting, because the impact can be so painful.
And so it is with internet service. This morning, I was missing internet service for a while. It happens sometimes, but rarely longer than three-four minutes. This time it went on and on. Of course my first reaction is “oh no! Am I being penalized for having written about internet phone service being blocked???” But no, this time it wasn’t all about me. It was just an outage, and – for now – just temporary. Alhamdallah!
But this policy is going to impact on all of us painfully. Please, please raise your voices. You know better than I do where it will be the most effective. It’s important that we be able to communicate with our family and friends in a reasonably priced way. The internet phones don’t hurt anybody. Let’s keep them legal.
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Amazina
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Here There and Everywhere 
*When people are short of listening skills; and never wait tell you get over your blocked words.
It used to feel personal, yet not any more. It is them who lack it, and it has nothing to do with my stammer.
very true. many times things happen to me and i get paranoid thinking if i did something wrong to deserve this. its all misconception. as for internet phones, i know skype was banned in dubai. dont know if kuwait will follow.
i dont actually use skype but there must be a way around the ban. hopefully it wont last long cos these things never really alst long unless they really are serious this time around.
i guess you’ll have to resort to messenger audio and video for the time being.
my secretary does use an internet phone and hes got friends in the illicit call shops, so if this ban does go thru i’ll let you know how they work around it. theres just too many expat labourers here for them to just give up on the service. and it makes them too much money. do let me know when the ban is active and i’ll start asking around in kuwait’s murky expat labour underground 😛
oh and fyi the “wastage” they claim is actually half of the kuwaiti’s in this country not wanting to pay their normal phone bill and has nothing to do with this issue at all. the telecom ministry then has to blame someone apart from their own people for why they had a drop in revenue. with wasta you can actually not pay and keep your international phone line up and running. so basically the same reason that the power and water kept getting cut off last year.
True Faith – Wow. Your attitude is so mature. I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through to get there.
Fonz -We ALL get paranoid sometimes – I am guessing it is part of being human! “It’s all about me” is something we all share.
The internet phone services were all officially banned this week. It was in the Kuwait Times. Same thing happened in Qatar, two years ago, but was quickly reversed when the international community expressed outrage. Let’s hope the same thing happens here.
SKUNK – I can always count on you for the rest of the story. 🙂 There are already some work-arounds, but so far, as usual, it is the poorest of the poor who will be hit the hardest. It’s just such a pity.