You wake up one morning to the radio and notice a strange tone of rising panic in the voice of Steve Inskeep. The company known as Google is gone. Completely and utterly missing. They did exist, once. Everyone remembers they existed, the word “googling” is still there in the dictionary, you check. Or at least you try to, but you don’t remember the URL for the dictionary, and Chrome is missing from your computer so you have to use Firefox and Bing. You would’ve typed “bing” into Google to get to bing, but now you have to remember to type “bing.com”. You’d use Yahoo, but come on, seriously.

Blogger is gone. Picasa is gone (your aunt’s extensive poodle photos, vapor). Consequently, to fill the gap, and to repeat the growing astonishment, Facebook traffic spikes. Facebook pleasantly chuckles, assured they are now the web proper, and everything else outside around them like duck face reposting medieval fiefs.

People begin to notice a peculiar lack of web ads. When they try to leave comments demanding the advertising be returned immediately, however, the captcha widget they’d been so used to using is also gone.

Appointments are missed. No calendar. Massive amounts of email, gone, not just your gmail address, but the innumerable companies that use Google apps as email for their domain. People wonder if that hotmail account they had so many years ago is still working. SMS use triples, at least by those who don’t have Android phones.

Those phones are still there, just dead. People with iPhones return to 2008’s level of smugness, which is goddamn unbearable for anyone around them to sit through and listen to hours and hours of conversation again about how great the iPhone is (and not be able to complain about them instantly on Twitter).

Work spreadsheets with tasks and miscellaneous data are gone. This is inconvenient for me, probably a disaster for others. If you’re an editor, your week is absolutely fucked. The few that have taken the plunge into using Chromebooks just stare blankly at it, wondering if they still have that Dell and scratched up disk of MS Office 03 somewhere.

Some office workers believe the web itself is gone, since their IT departments had been using Google DNS as a fail over a couple weeks ago and hadn’t set it back. So now addresses don’t resolve.

Website metrics for several years, gone. Sure, you can find a replacement service, perhaps even free. But those years of data, gone.

The several people using Google TV aren’t bothered, because that thing is a total boondoggle and they’re on Netflix too anyway. However, the black smoking hole which was once Youtube causes riots across the globe, since no webisode flavors of the week and no more Maru the cat means that people are suddenly cognizant again of the incompetent governing power structures around them. Broadcast television starts rerunning as much old Hollywood Squares as they can in hopes of quieting the unrest.

We’re all in this together.