Yet another reason to buy a cupcake
It’s just a little bit of metal, right? This gray/black whirring, whining, groaning box that holds every one of my clients’ files, my book, all my original writing, photos of my nephews… It’s not really evil, is it? Not intrinsically so, I suppose. Yet, the power it holds over me (over all of us, really) to make our days suck is pretty substantial.
Yeah, the day sucked. In a nutshell, Contact Us emails from this site and Cheapskate Freelancer were vanishing into cyberspace when they downloaded into Outlook (I saw it happen!). They’d be there on the iPhone, and then when I hit Send/Receive…. POOF. No more email. No more wonderful new tools sent to me from readers. I’ve lost several in the past few days — all that’s left is the small memory I have of seeing on the tiny iPhone screen as I drank coffee in the morning.
But the bigger mystery here is not the emails… it’s the dependence we have on these little black boxes. How did this become the center of my world?
And another important question… when has it NOT been the center of my world?
For most of my adult life I’ve held jobs that revolved around these little things. I really can’t imagine what I would sit at a desk and stare at if I didn’t have these monitors. What a different world it must have been where you sat at a desk and could look unencumbered across the room to other people at desks. And perhaps those people attended meetings where everyone looked at the speaker, not down at a hand cupped over a BlackBerry.
At any rate, I spent the morning cussing at the computer and the afternoon listening to the IT consultant, who blamed my fondness for free and low-cost tech tools on the slow demise of my lovely HP Pavilion. Looks like she’ll be put out to pasture soon (remember the story of how she got here?). The fact that she’s acting up during crunch time for the book is akin to being dumped during finals week in college. But I’ll be making the switch to a new machine soon, and again the black anchor will be at my feet to keep me at the desk.
Your turn… what was the last job you had that didn’t involve a computer?
Beth on 24 Mar 2010 at 6:29 pm #
My last job without a computer had to be housekeeping gigs when I was traveling around the country with sister Sarah. I had a little electric typewriter on which I chronicled our travels, but that certainly doesn’t qualify as a computer, since the only product of that writing was a 50-page rough manuscript of what was to be my first almost-published book, “America on Five Dollars an Hour.”
chris uschan on 24 Mar 2010 at 6:50 pm #
beth — what a bummer. you should set up a google account that all it does is reads in email from your avenuez.net account. It becomes your back up. Did I mention that I love Google email as my free tech-tool?
My last job that didn’t require a computer— I used to play hockey (minor league). There were no computers I wanted to smash when things went wrong, but on occasion, sometimes in practice when too many pucks got by me (I was a goalie) and things were just not going my way, well, um, I smashed my stick over the net. Okay, I admit, probably not a good thing to do. It was the sticks’ fault, not mine.
: )
Sarah on 25 Mar 2010 at 7:22 am #
See – that’s what I tell my students, “Technology is wonderful…when it works!”
Yes, I rely on my computer to make life easier, but every day I am responsible for inspiring students to love learning, with or without computers. As a teacher, I try not to put too much of my lesson on computers (power point, websites…) because many times it does not work at crunch time.
Sorry to hear about your computer.
Roy Moses on 25 Mar 2010 at 6:43 pm #
The last job I had with no computer involvement? It had to be at what was then called North Texas State University in the mid- to late-seventies. I was teaching journalism in what was later called the “old journalism building.” After moving to the new building in 1977, I think, we got computers probably the next year. Sometime about the mid-seventies we got new IBM Selectric typewriters (those with the little ball) for the reporting lab in the old building, and we thought we’d “gone about as far as we could go,” as the song about Kansas City says in “Oklahoma.”
Condolences.
Roy Moses on 25 Mar 2010 at 6:46 pm #
PS — Your computer says my previous message was sent at 6:43 pm, but my computer says 9:43 pm. What time zone are you in, anyway?
Global Patriot on 26 Mar 2010 at 11:28 am #
I’ve just spent the last three weeks of my life dealing with laptop hell – mine crashed, as did my son’s – just today I’m running again on the repaired Lenovo, wondering if the hard drive will crash again, and plotting my way to multiple backups of data on three continents!