So yesterday, a Telstra engineer flicked the wrong switch, or failed to flick the right one, or something. For a few hours around lunchtime that little mistake got between millions of us and the source of our addiction. And we reacted as addicts do when denied a fix — with desperation, fear and even, rage.

In five capital cities, people meeting for lunch were suddenly unable to send superfluous messages such as "running late" or "nearly there".

Office workers on the way to the juice bar couldn't get on to their Facebook feeds to see what interesting fun things their friends were doing that they weren't.

The two-way trade between boyfriends and girlfriends in SMSd sweet nothings was interrupted. S

Some frenzied viewers hammered their remotes uselessly in search of the Lifestyle Channel's must-see Tuesday viewing: Grand Designs Australia, Escape to the Country, Antiques Roadshow. 

Is this the apocalypse #telstraoutage— Dawn Psereckis (@hdawny) February 9, 2016

Not the apocalypse, but it was serious. It was serious for the businesses who lost trade because their modus operandi depends on mobile communications to book jobs, to direct tradespeople around the city, to co-ordinate business meetings, even to make or receive payments.

It was a reminder how heavily we have come to rely on this most convenient of technologies. Mobile networks are now just as crucial as electricity and water infrastructure, we are told. As people abandon the copper chord, their landlines, for handsets, the White Pages and Yellow Pages aren't the hefty doorstops they once were.

But for most of us, it was a minor inconvenience. Perhaps even a chance to remember what life was like before the early 1990s, before we walked around with mobile phones permanently attached to our palms. When pedestrians weren't glued to their screens, so didn't routinely crash into each other in the street. When you used your actual voice to ask a teenager to do a chore, instead of instant messaging because you know that's the only way to get their attention.

if a 3-hr Telstra outage is that much of an issue for your biz or life… I’d humbly suggest you rely on Mobile WAY TOO MUCH— Not BuzzFeed (@deeFzzuB) February 10, 2016

According to one estimate, mobile phone users check their phone on average 150 times a day. It's estimated US smartphone users spend an average of about one hour a day using their their mobiles, and average US app usage is two hours or more daily.

For most of us, not being able to get on the network is a source of annoyance rather than a matter of life and death. We usually handle it OK when we have a self-induced outage because we've let the battery run down. When it's our fault, not Telstra's.

But Telstra is a big target. It's giving customers a day of free data download on Sunday by way of apology. It boasts that its response time to customer calls last week was an average of 45 minutes. But that's not very encouraging for the countless customers who've spent hours on the phone getting the runaround between different departments when trying to sort out a problem with the service they're paying dearly for. When Telstra has the highest mobile profit margins in the country — around 40 per cent of earnings — its 16.7 million subscribers understandably expect nothing but the best. Starting with a reliable service.