My electronic devices have been giving me trouble lately. This week my computer slowed, my Fire Stick died, and my smart tv developed a pink spot in the upper right corner of the screen. Only a week earlier my website crashed, and three weeks ago all of the warning lights on my car’s dashboard lit up for no apparent reason.
Pete, my mechanic of almost thirty years, checked out my car and found nothing wrong with it. He got the warning lights off by rebooting the vehicle’s computer, but was not sure whether a simple reboot solved the problem, He said that if the same thing happened again, he’d bring my car to a younger, more tech-savvy mechanic across town. Rayna, the woman who maintains the server space where I keep my website, helped me get my site back up. She was kind enough to say that I may not have received the email about WordPress’s big upgrade, and if I had, I would have been able to fix the glitch myself. Just last night, after taking more than an hour to link my new Fire Stick to my old tv, I came close to getting Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime all up and running. And as far as the pink spot on my tv, I notice it only if I look at the screen from a particular angle, so I’ve decided to ignore it and hope it doesn’t get bigger or more pronounced.
Most importantly, I got my computer almost up to speed. The biggest improvement came when I emptied my downloads folder, which surprised me because there was not much in it. After trying everything I could think of to create space on my hard drive, I called Clare to ask if she had any other suggestions. She gave me a few ideas, but didn’t think my problem was available space. She told me that old Macs don’t handle new updates well and that my computer, no matter what I did, would progressively get slower. “Someday,” she said, “you’ll have to give up and buy a new one.”
For old guys like me, technical glitches never leave us alone. It reminds me of my years of teaching at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Every autumn I’d attend a training session about the latest campus-wide software upgrades. At the introduction of each of these trainings, Jim, the guy in IT who spoke the best non-geek English, would always start out by saying, “Once you get used to these changes, you’ll like them.” I and most of the senior (i.e., older) staff in the room would immediately think, “No, we won’t,” and we were usually right.
None of these comments are meant to suggest that i am anti-technology. In the early 1980s, technology changed my life for the better, and for that alone, I will always be grateful. I was among the first Ph.D. students to write their dissertations on personal computers. Mine was a Macintosh, a square box about the size of a wastepaper basket with a black and white screen not much larger than a slice of bread. It had almost no storage, so everything went on floppy disks. Everyone in my cohort had their dissertations on multiple floppies and stored those floppies in two or three different locations. We also made dot matrix paper copies as backups to our backups, because none of us fully trusted our ability to use the technology properly. I never lost anything, but a friend of mine accidentally misused an indexing feature in his word processing program and put all of the words of his dissertation in alphabetical order. I’m not sure what he would have done had he not had a backup.
I and probably every 1980s graduate student thought these early home computers were godsends. At the time, and even today, I don’t know how those who went before us wrote and then repeatedly revised their dissertations. I am certain that I would have never finished mine had I had to write it on a typewriter.
In addition to the gremlins in my car, my website, my tv, my computer, and my Fire Stick, my microwave oven died. The new one is a significant improvement over the old one, but now I have to unlock it each time I want to take something out. Why do I need a lock on my microwave?
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