Like so many of my friends and family, I don’t drift along in life so much as I paddle upstream a whole lot of the time. I believe this is the reason most of us can’t recall what it is we’ve been up to recently; especially when asked by a distant relative who happens to drop by on their way to Disneyworld.
For instance, I lost an entire week of my life trying to catch up with the changes to my technology. It surfaced in an innocent way, as all epoch adventures do. We were watching a streaming movie and my wife mentioned that the shuttering of the picture along with the non-sync of the dialog really bothered her. So we jumped into investigating and discussing options with our Internet provider. From that, we discovered our wifi router was invented when crayons still only came in the dozen and sixteen size boxes; in other words, we needed to speed things up. Super, we purchased a new wifi that is the Sea biscuit of racing routers; hooked it up, and no great change. Comes to find out our wifi CARD in our laptop is also ancient, and oh by the way we discovered that our service provider was going to charge us to lease our modem. Does all this sound familiar? It should if you read my ruminations often enough, I wrote about it a few days ago in my post The Illusionary Choice, so without belaboring all of the rest of that phase of the adventure, let me move towards the truly amazing quality I’ve discovered from this experience.
I had grown to trust technology to deliver up what I wanted once I learned what it was designed to do. I want it now; I want it quickly; and I do NOT want to experience ANY interruptions to said promises of performance, once they have been delivered into a routine fashion that accented my living condition; in other words, I was setting myself up for a big fall. I learned that help desks are really No Help Desks manned by people with (1) erroneous opinions about source of technological dysfunctions, and (2) Ready to blame other brands of equipment that are linked in unison to theirs in order to provide a desired result. Oh and (3) Non-native English speakers are way too polite in avoiding the sacred phrase rarely heard these days, “I don’t know.” I realize there is an art in ending a phone call. I’ve been the subject of much art as of late. But avoiding frustration is a frustrating experience. I have grown weary of being told I don’t have a problem, when I do; and most often that problem is I’m speaking with a person with few skills to tend my technical problems; if their ready-scripted-item list doesn’t do it, I’m screwed.
That’s the crux of my problem; I’ve become ensnared into a situation of having to trust technology I don’t understand; speak technology with another human being where both of us only have a spattering of an understanding of what it is we’re talking about, or how it relates to the topic that brought the two of us together over thousands of miles and several cultures away; as well as challenging me with questions I have no idea what they mean, how to respond to them, or even how I can find the answers to the question. All the while recognizing I must participate in this dance of technological gibberish if I have any hopes of fixing the problem that is keeping me from enjoying the technology I purchased; I become the problem to the problem solver….as it were. I felt like Alice in Wonderland; frankly I’m still unconvinced I’ve returned to normbal.
Suffice to say all of my gear is presently talking to one another, and I’ve more blue blinking lights on my desk than Hartsfield Airport has on its runways; and if you don’t know where Hartsfield Airport is, it’s in Atlanta and is the busiest Airport in the land. So I will end this chuckle with a quote from a great Albert; not me….nor my pop…but that guy who let the laws of physics out of the science box to become an issue of contemplation for the average guy on the street who still couldn’t tell you how his toaster worked; or for my generation, what’s the difference between a modem and a router.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” ~ Albert Einstein.
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