Over the past two months of traveling abroad, I haven’t had cellular data so I’ve become incredibly reliant on WiFi. Fortunately much of Spain has free WiFi at restaurants and even in certain plazas. Of course not all WiFi is created equal, and with my frequent use as of late, I’ve become quite the connoisseur.

And to be frank, it has been quite painful.

First off we’ll discuss slow WiFi as a viewer. Slow WiFi is a sort of frustration that drives one mad like Chinese water torture. The first couple pages that take a long while to load are annoying. With each tick of the buffering circle you’re that much closer to a page loading. The longer it takes, the longer you’ve waited and you that much more committed to seeing it through. You imagine the dark nightmare of hitting refresh just for the page to load before the white blank screen returns.

(It’s now as I type this that I truly understand Mumford & Sons lyrics: a white blank page, and a swelling rage. Yes, I couldn’t have stated it better.)

But right before you give up, there are words are appearing on the screen, and before you know it you’re scrolling along. That is until you hit the tiny grey squares with the little blue question marks. At least with the question mark squares you know all hope is lost; you’re never going to see that image. Rip the Band-Aid off then move on with your life. It was probably a meme you’ve already seen. What are really agonizing are the large grey squares, because with the large grey squares there’s hope. There’s hope that any second that image is just going to pop up and everything will be right with the world. But then you wait and you wait, and you’re back playing that game of chance. Do you refresh? Do you go without the images? Do you wait just a bit longer?

There’s a million different scenarios this can play out but it always ends in the game of chance. I could go on and on about the struggle of buffering videos and movies with speed of a turtle with two legs, but it’s a dark time that I don’t like to go to willingly.

Posting with slow WiFi is not much better, especially when you're trying to send a quick text asking for information that’s time sensitive and you see the blue sending signal inching across the screen. The there are the less stressful moments, but nonetheless frustrating. For instance, trying to post an Instagram picture with slow WiFi is like trying to text with mittens: a lot of work for a lot of nothing you can actually send. You go through all the trouble to pick out a picture and a filter and craft an incredibly witty caption. You also have to get a feel for the right amount of emojis per your own personal taste and the particular photo in question. Boom done. Somehow despite all odds slow WiFi has yet to mess with you yet. But then you go to tag someone, and you won’t know their Instagram username (of course you don’t because slow WiFi never happens when you can type their handle by heart.) So you wait for the name to pop up and maybe you even decide to skip and come back to that part, so you head over to location. And what do you know there are no immediate options. So after typing in various letters and waiting not-so patiently, you either find a good location or you decide to forgo the whole thing. You think back to tagging and remember that at least you can always tag them later. So you go to post and the beautiful masterpiece you’ve created shoots out. You’re taking back to the main scroll and you watch the little blue line surge towards victory only to stop a centimeter from the finish line. I always wait 10 to 20 seconds, and if it’s longer than that, I mourn the death of my post until the next opportunity.

Another simpler and admittedly avoidable pitfall with slow WiFi is the receive/send debacle. It always so happens that I will have just enough wifi power to receive a text, I’ll open it read it and then reply only to have it bounce back with an angry red "Failed to Send" label. And of course, my read receipts will be on and I’ll have just that teeny teeny amount of WiFi to send them the Read: 4:41 p.m. Or the dreaded open triangle on Snapchat. I’m then forced to have to stare at it and hope that my concentration will boost the signal just enough to reply.

Now that I’ve dealt with two months of hit-or-miss reception, most of my friends know that within an hour or several that I’ll respond appropriately. Even with that grace, the frustration of not being able to send a quick "Talk to you in a bit!" hasn’t dissipated in the least. The amount of times I try to load something and am met with a blank page is astounding, but not nearly as much as the number of times I look off into the distance like I’m on "The Office." Slow WiFi has varying degrees of pain. but with time and practice, you might just be able to turn the frustration from feeling like being engulfed by flames into a dull, annoying headache.