Moroccan Internet Cafes

I would wager that roughly 1/17th of my time in Morocco has been spent either in search of a cyber, or waiting for the horrendously slow Moroccan internet to load gmail. The Moroccan system of internet cafes, or cybers, has a few rules that I've been able to deduce as I watch the white screen with the small, red "loading..." sign in the bottom right that tells me my gmail account is a mere 3-4 minutes away.

1. The farther away from Casablanca you get, the slower the internet will be.

2. Never ask the staff for help, because they probably know less about computers than your grandmother. (Once, I couldn't log in to skype because there was a new version available, but the internet was so slow that the new version would take 6 hours to download. I called the staff guy over, and he proceeded to delete all the cookies on the computer, individually, and told me to try logging in again. I tried, naturally it didn't work, and again, he deleted the 1 new cookie, and told me to log in again. This happened 4 times.)

3. Never look at another person's monitor, because you won't like what you see.

In a tiny desert town called Tazzerine, where Ross and I were stranded in for one night, we were directed by a friendly seeming Spanish-speaking Moroccan to a small cyber described as "muy tranquilo." We went in, waited ages for the computer to boot up, logged into gmail, snuck in a quick bit of meditation while my inbox loaded, and finally managed to read one email before the power went out. Ross and I looked at eachother, shrugged, and repeated the process, power outage and all, after which we told the manager "nos vamos." He gave us a look of understanding and resignation, and said we didn't have to pay.

Later we found out that the entire town suffers from intermittent power outages, which makes me wonder why anyone would attempt to open a cyber at all.