I miss the old Earthquake reactions.

Where were YOU at 2:29:10 pm PDT today?  If you were in the San Francisco Bay Area, you probably felt the tremor that rattled windows, shook cars, and sent many an amphibian into a midafternoon tizzy (as far back as 373 BC, from Greece to China, there are documented accounts of toads and frogs fleeing en masse from earthquake epicenters as much as three days or as close as 20 minutes prior to the seismic activity itself happening).  Luckily for those of us fortunate enough to live in a region (unlike Haiti, for example) well-fortified against earthquake activity, today's tremor caused no damage whatsoever.

It did remind me of my first earthquake experience (do you remember your first time?), nearly 20 years ago.  As soon as the tremor subsided, peoples' heads started popping out the top of their office cubicles like a really big game of whack-a-mole.  Everyone was shouting to each other at the same time.  "Did you feel that?" "Is everyone okay?" "How big was it?" "Is it over?" Telephones were ringing off the hook as people checked in with family and friends.  Everyone tuned in to the local news to get the who, what, when, where, how big.  There was comfort and comraderie in the noisy chaos that followed the instinctive fear of feeling the quake hit.

I miss that.

As soon as this afternoon's quake subsided, there was an immediate explosion of reaction -- online.  Facebook and twiter lit up with posts and tweets.  But what really rattled me once the rattling stopped was how all of the rattling on about the rattling was online. My office was compeltely silent.  Except for the tap-tap-tap of fingers hitting keyboards.  Everyone in the office was texting, posting, smsing, tweeting, googling.  No one was talking.

The USGS site told me that the magnitude 3.5 quake was centered at 37.665°N, 122.516°W, at a depth of 6.7 km/4.2 miles.  Exactly 15km/9 miles in the Pacific Ocean offshore from the dome of San Francisco City Hall.  This information was accompanied by a very pretty satellite map with the epicenter of the quake outlined in bright red.  I had that information at my fingertips (by my fingertips? of my fingertips?) within minutes of the quake.   But I wanted the human interaction - the "WOW!  Did you feel that?" verbal conversation with someone else who had just felt it too.  Sure, it was nice to know that everyone was fine by being able to scan the facebook page and see peoples' posts.  But I missed the gather-round-the-water-cooler-and-talk-about-it aspect.

Can I get a hug?