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As Joni Mitchell sings in "Big Yellow Taxi," "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." This weekend brought that home to me -- how relying on a single point to supply something critical can be a big problem when that single point fails.

Late Friday night, I was up waiting for members of a visiting band who were going to stay at our house when they were done with their gig in downtown Blacksburg. I was, as usual, running World of Warcraft on one monitor and Firefox on another, reading, blogging, playing, chatting and all those things I use the Internet for.

I was zipping merrily along until about 1:30 a.m., and then everything ground to a halt. The network stopped responding. Warcraft crashed. I started getting that dreaded message "Page Load Error" when I would try to go to any Web page.

I reset the wireless router, checked the cable-modem, all to no avail. I got on the phone to Comcast only to be shunted via automated voices to a never-ending cycle of hold-music hell alternating with a repetitive message cheerfully explaining how much my life is going to suck when the TV broadcast system switches over to digital.

We don't get cable TV, which I usually don't miss regardless of how much Comcast thinks I need it, but at that point if I could have I would have been flipping channels trying to find a news report on network outages. It was too late to call anyone on the telephone (except Comcast, and no one was answering) to see whether any of the neighbors were out, or if it was just me. I tried listening to the radio, but at that time of night, Radio IQ on 1260 AM doesn't come in on my equipment, WVTF on the FM was deep into "Jazz After Hours" and WUVT was playing an energetic set of obscure music on a specialty show. No news to be found anywhere.

Eventually, I reluctantly accepted that the Internet, my sole source of information of any kind, was cut off for the night. The guys in the band showed up and we sat up late talking, and for a while I forgot the anxiety I had been feeling from not being able to connect to the Internet.

When I got up the next morning, the network was back up. Hurrah! I sat down at my computer and fired up my Web browser. I use Google as my home page, and when it came up with its familiar spare white background and colorful letters, I immediately typed in a search for something I wanted to read about. The trusty search engine did its thing, brought back a list of returns -- and every single one of them was marked with the ominous message, "This site may harm your computer." I boggled. (If you boggle at Google, is it a "boogle"?)

At this point I was worried that I had a virus, so I started searching for Macintosh antivirus sites. Still, everything came up as potentially harmful. Apple.com, symantec.com, macfixit and digg, Google was marking everything as malware infested. I opened up Warcraft and used its chat feature to ask some of my buddies if they were seeing the same thing I was. They said Google was fine, so I worried even more. How was I going to find anything? I know there are other search engines, but I couldn't think of any I liked.

Eventually I tried another Google search. I got normal-looking answers and nothing was marked as potentially harmful to my computer. Later in the day, news stories started filtering in about the Google "glitch" that had caused the problem, which had affected anyone in the world who tried to use the search engine. I was relieved that it wasn't just me, but since then I have been thinking about how relying on a single source for information, or Internet access, or heat, or electricity can be dangerous. Any monoculture, whether it's a food crop such as potatoes, an operating system such as Windows, a heat source such as electricity, or an information source such as Google, makes those who rely on it vulnerable.

Pris Sears lives in Blacksburg and works at Virginia Tech.