It’s 11:00 pm, and I’m laying in bed, surfing the ‘net… and suddenly, the whole apartment starts shaking! This is Irving, TX, people, we don’t get shaking floors in these parts. My husband is in the living room, and we look at each other with confusion. “Um, was that an earthquake?” Surely not, since, ya know, we don’t get earthquakes in Texas very frequently. Cue operation: figure out if we had an earthquake. GO!

My husband heads to the official government website that tracks and measures earthquakes around the US. I head to Facebook and Twitter. Guess who got verification first? The hashtag earthquake query on Twitter brough up confirmation from around the metroplex in less than 20 seconds. My Facebook status update resulted in confirmation replies with locations within 10 seconds. So while I’m hitting F5 and seeing reports of the earthquake from friends and strangers, my husband is still waiting on the government website to register any news at all. It took a full 15 minutes for the site to show our earthquake. Heck, we had an AFTERSHOCK before the official site logged the first set of ripples! The aftershock was also confirmed by social media before the initial shock was recorded through official channels!

Am I the only one who nerds out about this kind of connectivity? I mean, there was a time when you had to wait MONTHS to get news, and now we have real-time conversations about events. #blowsmymind!