I roll around in bed to find my iPhone, it’s on the nightstand. For some reason, it’s not working. Just what I needed. Maybe the battery's dead… Nope, even plugged in, it’s not working. Great. I don’t even remember hitting it while partying, but to be honest, I hardly remember anything from last night.

But all is not lost: I’ve got my laptop in the drawer. With another big stretch, I can reach it. Hey, that’s not working either! What’s going on?

I get out of bed, dizzy, but I get up. I go check if the TV works because I still have no clue what time it is. I don’t even have a darn clock in the house, I should order one from Amazon. Okay, the TV works, thank goodness. And it’s 2 in the afternoon! Between that and my phone not working, brunch is ancient history. Since I’ve got nothing else to do, I leave the TV on, which I haven’t done in a long time. It’s news hour, and every channel is broadcasting the same story:

“What happened to GAFAM?” “A World Without GAFAM” “All About the Fall of GAFAM”

I have no idea what GAFAM means, and I remembered I couldn’t Google it the second I reached for a phone that wasn’t there. Luckily, África Baeta explained it in a flash:

- If you woke up this morning and couldn’t use your Apple devices, your Amazon order didn’t arrive, or you couldn’t do a Google search, don’t worry; you’re not the problem. GAFAM, an acronym made up of the tech giants Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, has been hit by an unprecedented virus that has shut down systems across the world.

Phew, it’s not just me. Thanks, África, I appreciate it.

Well, now that I’m a bit calmer even though all the world’s systems have collapsed, with everything that means for business and society… maybe I’ll make some pancakes to help with this terrible hangover I must bear with. Oh, right, I don’t know the recipe… Let me see if I can find that cookbook my mom gave me… Who thinks it’s a good idea to gift a cookbook in the 21st century? Although right now, it’s the only thing that’s actually useful, to be honest.

After eating the best pancakes of my life, the doorbell rang. It was my friends, worried that something had happened to me (though, just in case, they came after stuffing themselves with a massive breakfast, not before).

We’ve obviously been talking about the hot topic: the fall of the companies that control our favorite pastimes. Maite told us she heard on the news that before all this happened, around 177 billion emails were sent and received daily, 1.3 billion Instagram posts were uploaded, and 1.6 million packages were shipped by Amazon every day. No wonder this is pushing us toward a global crisis…

Even so, we concluded that there are probably a lot of people who will be grateful for what’s happened: small businesses, the environment, people who work weekends, the non-competition of these giant multinationals… and us too. It’s been a long time since we sat down to just talk about life and reflect on stuff without pulling out our phones to see who’s right.

After my friends left, I turned the TV back on and watched a movie on La Noche De… that had already started 15 minutes earlier, exactly like our grandparents used to do. I never understood it before, but today, watching the movie that way made me feel a little bit closer to them.

Honestly, aside from the hangover, it’s been a good day. Tomorrow’s Sunday, and since I won’t have an alarm to wake me up early in the morning, I might bake a little cake and invite my mom over to try it. That way, she won’t be able to ask me again whether I’ve used her recipe book…