Throughout the ages, life has been an unendurable burden for rural peasants around the world, more acutely so in winter than at any other season. Nowhere is that more true than in the eastern parishes of Bermuda these days for knowledge workers, the miserable urchins who attempt to ply their trade electronically.

In the 19th century, oil barons rode roughshod over the little man, building great empires on his back and his sweat. Today, the telecommunications companies have stepped into that role in Bermuda, charging world-beating prices for services they all too rarely provide.

Far out east in the boondocks, at unimaginable distance from Hamilton (nine miles), lie ancient geological formations known as "hills". They are in fact tiny rises, not actual hills, but they stand as monumental excuses for the non-delivery of wireless technology. Reliable Internet service is merely a mystical notion to the eastern yokels. Dependable cell phone service? Not likely.

The World Wide Web is supposedly on hand at the airport. Bermuda's gateway to the world is the sole reason — let's be honest — why East Enders are even tolerated by the great potentates, the ganzemachers, of the central parishes. Time after time have I visited the airport, to test the system. It doesn't work. It's never worked. But then, why would it?

Why invest all that time and effort delivering a product when all you have to do is to promise it? Such is the guiding principle behind the myth of "service" to customers beyond the Longtail Bridge. The price they pay for their rural ease is a 50:50 shot at TV reception, and, if it rains, no telephone or hence Internet service whatsoever, sometimes for weeks on end. Such has been the case this week, which is why these words may carry the faint tinge of sadness and rue.

When the telephone goes out, the food supply dries up, as I shall explain. Then does the noble Easterner starve, as did the peasants in the fields of Japan portrayed in the classic movie The Seven Samurai, which through some accident or miracle was delivered to East End TV sets on Saturday last.

The movie portrays the life of the disenfranchised peasant as one of unremitting glumness. How true. In winter when it rains, which it sometimes does in Bermuda, the telephone lines fall silent. All thought of contact with the outside world expires. Then must the knowledge workers strap computing equipment to their backs and arduously hie themselves into Hamilton, where the streets are paved with broadband.

To reach the fabled city, they must drive over such prehistoric constructs as "the bridge that has no surface" and the cart track known laughingly as North Shore Road. With the arrival of unimaginable wealth in the central parishes, both these inconveniences are being attacked simultaneously, turning the 25-minute dawdle to and from town into an hour-long parkfest.

Forced to journey overland three times a day merely to collect their e-mail, against almost impossible odds, nothing galls the migratory knowledge workers more than the fleet of yellow Bermuda Telephone Company vans that permanently cruise the country's highways. Containing the magicians who have it in their power to briefly repair telephones until the next light shower, these vehicles rarely stop.

East of the airport, they outnumber taxis by a hundred to one, and sometimes Easterners dream of a merger, in which BTC stands for Bermuda Taxi Company, and an ink-stained wretch might then catch a cab with only, say, a week's notice. The daydream lasts but a second, and then the miserable reality of East End life returns.

Another movie somehow made it down the intermittent cable from civilisation recently, The March of The Penguins. Emperor penguins, it seems, must walk 70 miles, through horrid conditions, to conduct marital relations. How like the penguins are Bermuda's eastern knowledge workers, forced to drive up and down the North Shore Road three times a day just to earn a pittance. For them, of course, relations are out of the question: they are exhausted from all that driving and the grinding despair.

The penguins go without food for months on end, and so must the knowledge workers, for BTC will not despatch its wizards unless the service supplicants are at home to greet them, even if it takes months for them to arrive. The workers dare not leave their homes to work or even to visit the grocery stores.

The day after their telephones go silent, the knowledge workers must first partake in the age-old ritual of the forced drive into town, where they contact BTC from a friend's phone to answer over and over the same questions.

The time-honoured ritual proceeds thus:

BTC inquisitor: "What is your contact number?"

Peasant: "The one that's out of order."

BTC: "Oh. Then how do we get in touch with you?"

Peasant: "You can't. That's sort of the point."

BTC: "Oh. Well are you at home now?"

Peasant: "No, because the phone doesn't work there."

BTC: "Well, you must be at home."

Peasant: "I'm going there right now."

BTC: "Well, make sure you stay there."

Then follows the most important question.

BTC: "Do you rent any telephone equipment from BTC?"

Peasant (heart sinking): "No."

BTC: (Deep sigh).

And so, imprisoned in his home, stay there the peasant does, unable to visit the grocery store. Eventually he starves to death. This greatly satisfies the high and mighty of the BTC, for it reinforces the inestimable power they so haphazardly wield.

The tycoons at BTC have cleverly invested its wealth in salaries and in shareholder dividends, rather than in equipment that might work when it rains. At BTC, the term "packet switching" refers to payday. The peasants only vaguely understand all this, but they dare not challenge the wisdom of the gods.

What chance would they have were they to speak out? How many yellow vans would stop at their house then?

I can say no more, faithful reader, for I must prepare at once to carry this message to town by hand, as countless generations of Bermudians have done since time immemorial. This sorry practice will doubtless continue until the woeful East Enders die out altogether and St. David's Island becomes a giant parking lot for airport resurfacing trucks and occasional visitors to the land that time ignored.

As you wallow in your enormous wealth and your on-demand communications, spare a thought for the hopeless and broken of the eastern parishes, who live without the Internet, without respect, and without hope. Are they not people too? Apparently not.

Unlike the peasants or penguins in the movies, we filthy, stinking East End woebegones will never be rescued from the bandits, nor will we find mates. No one cares about us. We are truly Bermuda's forgotten and despised.