The Perils of Updating

It was time for the 6-year-old MacBook to die. It was still living in El Capitan, back in 2015. In the Mac world (where they give their operating systems cute names), I was years behind. Eons and mountains and deserts behind.

Websites were starting to remind me I was out of date, if not forbidding me entrance. Some browsers didn’t even want to know me anymore.

So I decided to update my system. Maybe travel as far as Big Sur or … Monterey! But then an alert popped up: my Microsoft Office 2011 wouldn’t work anymore if I updated my computer. I’d have to update to Microsoft 365.

Aiiiieeee! All this updating! They’re talking to a person who has had the same hairstyle for thirty years, who doesn’t ever rearrange furniture, who kept her beloved Subaru for 20 years and only heartbreakingly replaced it.

I took the plunge. It helped that my sister’s office was burglarized and she had to replace her computer, so some of the replacement research was done. (Sorry, Allison.) Both of us are now proud owners of MacBook Airs.

I can say “proud” because I’m just now recovering from hysteria. The Geniuses at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store must see me and run for the back rooms. Five visits in four days. And that’s not even counting the at-home computer consultant and the chats and phone calls with Apple Support. I’ve been a one-woman disturbance in the cloud universe.

The Cloud! The misty, obscure, and unknowable Cloud. Because I decided I’d have to backup to The Cloud in case (as happened with poor Allison) my laptop was stolen or destroyed. (Allison was wisely backed up.)

First, we had to empty the brains of my old laptop into the new brain. That was a couple of visits which involved the horrors of where did my neat little highly-organized folders go? Then there was the problem of where did my photos go?

And did I even talk about passwords? I could do an entire sitcom on passwords.

That’s when Nancy the Computer Whiz entered my home. She sat down at my computer and explained how to back up to The Cloud, and she made it happen. She explained how to do the password thing, the photo thing. But poor Nancy had me as a client.

So Nancy had to put up with many hysterical emails. Tim had to put up with hysteria in person. The Geniuses don’t know how close they were to having a crazy woman run amok in the Fifth Avenue Mall.

Because everything had disappeared from my computer. It was all in The Cloud, so what if I didn’t have Internet, did I have NOTHING?!?

I find it amazing – if not reassuring – that when I have a problem and ask Google, as I’m typing it out, Google auto completes my query. It means that other people have the same problem. I type in “document not…” and Google comes up with “not loading on my Mac,” “not updating,” “not in my backup,” etc etc. I type in “photos not…” and I get the catalog of everyone else’s problems with photos.

I type in “how to calm” and it’s amazing how many people need to calm down, calm anxiety, calm a hysterical person, calm a panic attack.

Eight emails and Nancy could not reassure me. “It’s all in The Cloud! It’s gone from my computer! Gone!!” Finally, she told me to disconnect from wifi. I did. My things were still there! They weren’t stuck in The Cloud, they’d just changed locations, rearranged the furniture.

My heart rate is slowing down. I can function again. I’d started out writing about things that merely confuse me before I was distracted by things that traumatize me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back to mere confusion.

Her and I can't be friends.

Her and I can’t be friends.

Oh, there are so many reasons why! First of all, her can never be the subject of a sentence. That’s reserved for she. Her can only be an object, as in “I’m not friends with her.” Secondly, her and I can’t do things together. They can’t appear in a sentence together like that. Ever.

If there’s her, then her friend has to be me. “Mary went to the store with her and me.” Both objects.

Only “she and I can be friends.” Subjects together. Happily.

I promised here, once before, that I do NOT correct other people’s grammar. But this is a story about being in my Third Third and suddenly confronting a revolution in the English language.

It’s everywhere! In movies, on radio, on TV: “Her and I went on vacation.” “Him and I missed the bus.” But this is the real horror: I shared this discovery with my daughter, who prides herself on her grammar, too. And she said, “I say that, too. I’d never use it in writing, but I do use it in spoken English. Sometimes I even say, ‘Me and her went out to eat.’”

Aiiiieeee! Me and her can’t do that!

Am I failing to evolve?

Why am I suddenly feeling like the supports of civilization are crumbling? I could handle it when Mick Jagger cried, “I can’t get no satisfaction!” No part of me wanted to counter, “Mick, it should be ‘I can’t get any satisfaction.’” It was a song lyric; it wasn’t spoken English. It’s to dance to, not to talk like. It’s not role-model English.

But role-model English appears to be right up there with walking to school and penmanship.

Am I showing my Third Third-ism?

I have another one: explainer. “Explainer” made its appearance and rapidly multiplied like rabbits. Even on NPR, they introduce “explainers” to clarify something that’s in the news. The explainer is not a person; the explainer is the explanation. See? There was a perfectly good word – explanation. If you don’t understand gravitational waves, then you just need an explanation, not some new-fangled explainer.

Listen to me! Soon I’m going to be talking about the length of skirts.

Speaking of which, didn’t women learn that miniskirts were a restrictive, restraining hassle requiring too much squirming and readjusting – why did they come back again? But I digress….

I know that we don’t say “thee” and “thou” in regular old English anymore. I know that languages change over time. I know Shakespeare invented a ton of words, and Lewis and Clark misspelled mosquito a dozen different ways. I have no problem with changes to their English, but this is my English. Am I upholding standards … or failing to evolve?

Some of my supposedly good English could be wrong. Like how I spent almost my whole lifetime thinking that dilemma was spelled dilemna, with an “n” like condemn. I shudder to think of places I must have used that. I bet I even argued with someone about it. I bet I even taught someone else my version!

A few years back, I started noticing the word woken in books, when I thought the only right way to say it was awakened. Who would ever say “You have woken the patient” rather than “You have awakened the patient”?

Turns out there are really four different verbs about opening your eyes after sleeping: awake, wake, awaken, and waken. When things go into origins in Old English, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verbs, transitive and intransitive, my eyes glaze over. I have my grammar limits. Ultimately, they advise going with what sounds right. Like, for instance, only woken or woke can go with up. One person suggested he “would go with ‘I was done woke up by that there alarm clock.’”

I laughed at that because it’s a joke. Because it’s funny.

Me and him might have the same sense of humor.

The Hair Rebellion

My hair has declared its independence from my head.

My hairdresser says, “Our hair changes texture over time,” but she’s being nice. My hair is in its Third Third, and it’s become a behavior problem.

My expectations are not unreasonable: I don’t expect to have cheerleader hair. You know, the hair that falls magically into place after the high school cheerleaders twirl and tumble. My hair snarls if I turn my head quickly. I’m used to that. And yes, I know if you look at my self-portraits, it looks like I’ve always had a wild head of hair. The color is deliberate. That’s not the problem.

The problem is the direction my hair has taken. As in, it aims away from my head instead of lying down on it. It has become very, very straight, with no bend or curve to match my head. Bangs stick out like porcupine quills. I look like Raggedy Ann. (Comparisons to Bozo not appreciated.) Observe.

So my hairdresser recommended a leave-in hair conditioner to “nourish” my hair. As with all things food, there’s a line somewhere between nourishment and obesity. My well-nourished hair got lazy and listless. It no longer flew off in all directions; it just laid itself out on the couch and declined to move. It hung from my head, flat and apathetic, as if it had been trapped in a bike helmet for two thirds of my life (with no intention – ever – of getting on a bike). It is the helmet.

The option of mechanical aids came up. While I may not, in fact, be a technological dinosaur when it comes to computers, I am a resoundingly inept dinosaur when it comes to … curling irons. I hold the hair up, look in the mirror, and proceed to burn the daylights out of my hands. My brain might correct for the reverse mirror image, but my motor skills don’t get the message. Too many welts and not enough motivation, and I abandoned the curling iron.

Which leaves my hair styling equipment of choice: electric rollers! Yes, me and Barbie. You put them in, wait a bit, and pull them out. Drab, flat, fly-away hair is transformed into bouncy, peppy, springy curls! Just seconds and you’re a Sandra Dee/Gidget/Donna Reed facsimile.

Since the flip went out somewhere in our First Third and even looking in the mirror you know the word is “dated,” you have to do something. You shake and shake your head till it’s a jumble of … hair.

I call this the “rumpled but smoldering” look. I actively sought this look in my 20s. I aspired to look as if I’d just jumped out of bed after sex.

Other people might just have called it “bed head.”

Getting Comfortable

Do you sleep on the ground?

Did you used to sleep on the ground? Like, in a tent?

I remember when camping in a tent meant the old, closed-cell foam camping pad. You could feel every rock in your back. When we discovered self-inflating Therm-a-Rests, life changed – we had cushion! A whole inch of cushion! I still remember our first camping trip with baby Sophie; she turned the tent into a bouncy house. We found her in the morning by the door of the tent, having bounced there after Tim and I fell asleep.

Funny, that old Therm-a-Rest just doesn’t bounce anymore. Or rather, I don’t bounce. I thump and rattle and groan.

One friend said it’s not even just the sleeping on the ground that gets her; it’s the getting up.

When I backpack, I sit on the ground. Many years ago, my mother-in-law gave me a fold-up-able chair that basically held my butt on the ground. It felt so extravagant. When we all had little kids, I took it on our first car camping trip with friends. I was a little embarrassed to bring it out around the campfire.

But then, everyone else unloaded real chairs from their cars! At first, it was just chairs. Then the chairs got arms. Then the arms got cup holders. Now the chairs have cushions.

It happened with stoves, too. Camping used to mean fiddling with stoves, relentlessly fiddling with little stoves that held a single pot and that always seemed to clog. The first time someone pulled out a two-burner Coleman stove, I almost flipped. Now we own one. We even put it in a kayak.

Now our friends camp with cots and air mattresses, even RVs. Last weekend, I spotted a car going into their tent site with a giant air mattress on the roof. The guy was riding the back bumper, holding the air mattress on the roof with his hands. She was driving really slowly, but how did they get there?!? I figured they must have gone to the electricity at the RV site to blow up the mattress and were now delivering it to their tent.

My friend Rob once had his well-used camping gear described as “prehistoric.” When I buy mine, it’s usually with the assumption that it will last a lifetime. (I buy a lot of things that way.) It’s my stubborn fight against planned obsolescence – not to mention the emotional attachment to my gear – but this curmudgeon side is now getting in the way of … progress. Yeah, I used to walk to school in the snow, too, but I’m pretty sure dinosaurs were uncomfortable before they went extinct.

When I hiked the Chilkoot Trail last summer, my friend Mary loaned me her blow-up NeoAir Therm-a-Rest. Wow! It was a sleeping transformation! It was thick and cushy and still lightweight; oh, the miracles of technology! But last weekend, Tim and I still pulled out our old, one-inch-thick Therm-a-Rests … and groaned and tossed and turned.

No more! If the world is building better mousetraps, I’m getting with the program. I love camping. I love sleeping in a tent, all contained and cozy. I love breathing air that hasn’t been inside walls. I’m ready to update!

Stodginess lurks in secret places, and it’s so liberating to cast it off.

Living in a (Bad) Fantasy World

I used to have a nightmare about growing older. I called it The Bag Lady Fantasy. I imagined – feared – that I’d spend my old age destitute, homeless, roaming the streets.

Way back when – in the ’70s, I think – Ms. Magazine did a survey on women and money. At the end, we could write in additional comments. I wrote about my Bag Lady Fantasy/Fear. When Ms. published the results, they were astonished at how many women had volunteered their fears of being a bag lady. There was no prompt for that; everyone just added it to the survey.

I could manage this fear by being financially responsible, saving for the future, holding a job. Ultimately, the fear dissipated. Was it after I performed the part of Trudy the bag lady in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe? Trudy was so wise and witty and sort of bonkers, but I really, really liked her. I wouldn’t mind being a Trudy … but I’d make sure I managed my financial resources.

But then I saw Hello, My Name Is Doris last night, and a whole new fear grew up: the fear of being pathetic – or viewed as pathetic. As the theater roared with laughter around us, my friend Robin and I were sliding lower and lower in our seats, pained with the characterization of Doris. (Not mind you, with Sally Field; she was truly extraordinary and brave and wonderful.)

Why did Doris have to be a cat lady, a hoarder, a garishly dressed and out-of-date woman? Doris had a job; she had a computer in her home. She had a loving circle of friends. We didn’t see this competent, capable, involved woman. No, we saw her reduced to stalking a younger man and totally humiliating herself. We see her dismissed as a dinosaur on the job.

My mother worked till she was 72. When we talked to her about retirement, she said, “Right now, I’m the head of a department. The day I retire, I’ll be a little old lady.” No matter how professional, upright, or honorable we might be, the world is ready to look at us as little old ladies. As Dorises.

For goodness sakes, I have orange hair! Am I practically a Doris already?

The AARP review is titled, “Sally Field Makes an Adorable ‘Doris.’” Adorable?!? Did they miss the portrayal of Doris as out-of-touch, eccentric, and shabby? Is “adorable” even the adjective we want for our Third Thirds? Doris was not adorable. Doris was every stereotype of an older woman: baffled by life, gullible, unfashionable, incompetent. Sorry, her big turnaround at the end doesn’t save the image of aging we’ve watched for the whole of the movie.

My Bag Lady Fantasy was a fantasy. It resided in my imagination. This new fantasy – the pathetic old lady – is not my imagination. It exists and lurks in the real world. People are ready to see older women that way. And to laugh at them. At me. At any of us.

The Pathetic Old Lady Fantasy is the stuff of nightmares.

Old Things Beyond Repair

When I buy something, I expect it to last a lifetime. Unfortunately, the something doesn’t necessarily cooperate. Now, in my Third Third, the somethings are falling apart. They’re dropping like flies.

The stereo, for example.

I was very proud of this purchase in 1986. It included a tuner, an amplifier, a double cassette deck, and a turntable. Oh, and big speakers. Yes, even I know it sounds obsolete, but it worked. Later on, I got a CD/DVD player and everything worked together. I could even pipe my TV sound through the speakers.

A couple of years ago, the power button on the amplifier stopped sticking. It wouldn’t stay pressed in so I got a stick and propped it between the button and the carpet. It worked, and guests never asked me why we had a stick sticking out of our stereo. Maybe everyone’s machines start getting finicky like that.

As I’m de-cluttering all my obsolete media (audio cassettes, VHS tapes, etc.), I have to be able to listen to them. So my obsolete stereo came in handy. Even with its required stick.

Well, then, of course we got the new carpeting, and I was reluctant to risk gouging a hole with the propped stick. But that proved a moot point because the whole amplifier/tuner – they’re attached – stopped working. Period.

I checked online with the handy Marantz Service Center locator. I plugged in Alaska: “No Service Centers Found.” So then I started phoning around. Guess what? Nobody fixes stereos anymore. They fix car stereos and phone gizmos, but not stereos. Or maybe just not old stereos.

Granted, I don’t darn socks either. My mother used to, but I decided I’d rather buy new socks. So I guess I can’t complain (except that socks are way cheaper than a whole stereo system!).

So I’ve had to start some preliminary research to Buy a New Thing. Can you see the dominoes starting to fall? The amplifier is connected to the CD/DVD player and the TV, even the obsolete VCR. Wanna bet the cables that go between them won’t work with a New Thing because millennial-generation cables and plugs don’t like Boomer-generation components?

But it turns out they don’t sell amplifiers by themselves. New stereos have everything – CD player, speaker – in the space of my broken tuner/amplifier. Things are tinier now.

But if I get new, tiny speakers, where do I put the ivy that sits on top and is connected to the walls and ceiling from the exact height of the top of the speaker? This is the same ivy I had to hold at the right elevation while the carpet guys laid carpet underneath the speaker. Do I keep a silent speaker like some vestigial organ in my living room?

No, now my research has to include finding a 32½-inch stand for the ivy pot. Maybe the stand can include a shelf for the new all-in-one stereo. I know I don’t need a turntable anymore. My friend Judith discovered they no longer make needles to play on hers.

Okay, put “donate albums” on my to-do list, too.

Barbara vs. The Machines (round 2)

This blog comes to you from my brand new MacBook laptop. If this were paper instead of electronics, and if I’d handwritten instead of typed, you would throw the paper down, horrified at the anxiety and torment reeking from the paper itself. You’d think, “Look at her handwriting; it’s so tortured.” The paper might even be hot.

Okay, I’m exaggerating. (Friends used to call it the Brown Correction Curve.) But this has not been an easy transition.

First there were the multiple visits to the Apple Store to make sure I was choosing the right laptop. Then there were the multiple visits to Costco and Best Buy to check out the cheaper alternatives for accessories (mouse, monitor). Then it was back to the Apple Store to see if the alternatives were the “right” ones.

Yes, I always shop like this. It’s why I remain minimum consumptive. This was a big shopping weekend. In addition to the laptop, I bought new hiking boots and a new mattress pad. Those were also demanding consumer expeditions; I could tell you a lot about mattress pads…. I think I’m happy with the hiking boots, but I have a long history of shoe regret. This is why almost everything I own is on its Third Third, too.

Meanwhile, the blog was becoming impossible on the old iMac. According to the Apple guys, my old computer had enough memory to turn the computer on … barely. Loading my blog was turning into a long slog every night. But my old computer had all the brains where I liked them, where I was used to seeing them.

So I paid the Apple guys to migrate old brains onto new laptop, which they did. And they promised me it would look exactly the same as my old computer. It does.

The problem? My scanner didn’t recognize the new kid in town. So I had to download more stuff. Except that the download site didn’t recognize my scanner, my new computer, or me. It told me my computer “was bought by a different user.” Different from me? Where’s their credit card? Where’s the “not OK” button?

[Pause for little attack of stress.]

I had a whole bunch of updates to download. The first said it would take 3 days! The scanner one said it would take 9 hours, then 4 hours. I started it, but it kept quitting at the halfway mark on the little bar and a message would say “Can’t install the software.” I did this over and over, thinking if I watched it, it wouldn’t fail. Ha!

Yesterday’s illustrations? They had to be scanned from Tim’s computer, which he then emailed to me. At this very moment, on my fifth try, the download has passed the halfway mark. We’ve been at it for four hours. There are six minutes left.  Four. Hooray, it made it!

Scanner doesn’t work. It needs the update, the one I just finished installing.

[Beyond pause. I am quitting for the night. I will see the Apple Geniuses in the morning.]

Gasp. Choke. Unwelcome adventures.

Oh, yikes, the wrong people have found me on the Internet. I am beyond upset. I am vibrating with agitation.

I was looking through my blog analytics, and I noticed that two of the blog visits had an extra bunch of letters in the URL. So I clicked on it.

It went to a fake version of my blog: no header, no right-hand side, just the words and drawings. I totally panicked: my computer must be crashing, I’d ruined its brains, my blog was disintegrating. So then I Googled just the extra letters, and it turned out to be on lots of other websites. Just inserted into them.

I asked Google, “What is XXXX?” but all I got was a homepage, written in Asian characters. The Chinese must be violating international copyright laws with my blog; I was a victim of cyber crime! I was also clearly out of my depth.

So then I had to figure out how to ask Blogger my questions, how to get on the “Forum.” Other people put their questions there, but I don’t even know the process.

Brief interlude for hysterical outburst:

I AM a tech dinosaur! There, I said it! I can’t get an answer to a question without negotiating another completely separate hurdle: I have to ask questions about how to post a question. And don’t even get me started on how am I supposed to receive the answers. Why does everything seem to lead to an endless trip down a technological rabbit hole?!?

Deep breath, deep breath. Remember: every hurdle is just another boost to maintain my cognitive abilities.

I figured out how to ask, and I asked. This morning, a very nice guy responded, and his little button said he was a “Google Expert.” Hooray! He said he couldn’t duplicate the result, could I tell him how I found the bad blog.

So I did my Google thing, and they were gone! Everything with that bunch of letters in it was gone except for the home page. So I checked my analytics again, and there was a third person going to that bad site! From Google! Oh, yikes, this was a mess. (Afterwards, I did figure out that was my Expert looking it up, but by this point, I was so freaked out, I felt like every incident was a cyber threat.)

I explained everything to my Google Expert, and he said “It looks like that site is taking content and hosting it on their server. You might want to contact the website owner to remove your content from their servers.”

Cyber thieves taking my stories and pictures! I was furious, but I worried that contacting them was like trying to unsubscribe from spam, that it confirmed to the bad guys that you were alive and then you’d never get rid of them. Not to mention that everything was in Asian characters. But my Expert told me to, so I went to their home page and clicked “Translate.”

Gasp. I’m even afraid to tell you what I found, that it will add me to their list again. Can I say they called themselves “erotic images” without the word “erotic” showing up in Google searches? (Too late.) And they’re sending people to a fake version of my blog! (Deep breath, deep breath.) I even feel icky touching my keyboard.

Immediately, I thought of the butt lineup from Costco, but that was a while ago. Why would I first hit their radar now? Oh, no! It must have been my butt peeing outside, hiding from the bus. Look here: is that an erotic image to you?

So I quickly replied to my Google Expert, asking him what I should do now, but he’s not responding! Maybe he’s checking my blog and Google will remove me! Already, “3rd Thirds” is only yielding searches about Third Graders. Here I am, in my Third Third, and I’m a Japanese porn attraction.

(sob)

Subscribe instructions ... simplified

Nothing like a technological glitch to send you down the rabbit hole of Google-land. And nothing like the rabbit hole of Google and Google Help Groups to leave you feeling incompetent, confused, and defeated. Depressingly, there’s a whole gang of us down there, shouting into the ether.

How this all started was because of the number of requests I get about how to subscribe to my posts. I point out the little box in the upper right that said “Follow by Email,” thinking that would be sufficient. BUT, I discovered the little box doesn’t appear if you’re viewing this on a smart phone. You have to go to the website.

I know it’s a little confusing because there’s another box underneath it that says Subscribe, but it has little boxes for “Posts” and “All Comments.” What are they for? Those are for RSS Feeds, the source of my journey into Google-land today. We’ll come back to them.

As I looked around on other blogs, I realized that a lot of them use the word “Follow” when they’re talking about Twitter. I am not on Twitter and don’t follow anybody on Twitter. And if you’re just looking to get my posts in your inbox, having the word “Follow by Email” on the subscriber box could get intimidating: will it sign you up for Twitter? As of right now, I changed it to say, “Sign up here to receive Our Third Thirds by email.” Does that work better?

After you type your email in the blank, click on “Submit,” and convince the computer you’re not a robot; it sends an email to you, asking you to verify that you really want to subscribe to my posts. Another batch of folks get derailed here. Sometimes it’s because there’s a typo in their email address, sometimes it just must get lost. But you can always try again.

So I wanted to learn a little bit more about RSS Feeds. I visited Robin, who reads my blog that way, on a service called NetVibes. She puts the things she likes to read on her NetVibes account, and when new stuff is published, it goes to her in one big package of “things to read.” Up pops my blog. For Robin, that works as a way of putting those “things to read” in one spot.

While in Google-land, an article described all the terrific things I could learn about my blog and its readers. The author praised the nifty pie chart that shows how readers were accessing his blog – email, on the web, NetVibes or some other feed service. I’ve looked all over, but my pie chart is nowhere to be found. My data shows my NetVibes is “invalid,” even though Robin is looking right at it.

So that became another question for the Google Help Forum. I didn’t want to miss the answer, so I checked the box to receive notifications. Uh, oh! I hope this means I only get answers to my question, not everyone else’s. See, this is why the word “follow” can get intimidating. If you get swamped, there’s no “unsubscribe.” Then you have to Google to learn how to stop notifications….

One response said the answer was described perfectly here … but the link didn’t work. I tried reaching a real human being to ask my questions, but that required joining Google+. Uh, oh, that sounds like following, like more notifications, like Twitter.

Precious daylight hours went into this trip down the rabbit hole. I found too many things I can neither explain nor understand and too many contacts and sources that have expired, were dead-ends, or look defunct. Maybe it proved too much for them, too.

I have that spacy, brain-dead, exasperated feeling that comes from too much machine and not enough humanity. Tomorrow will be a better day; I’m going to clean my bathrooms.

Technology vs. the Blog

Inexplicably, the printer stopped scanning my illustrations or even printing. I tried turning it off and on. I tried lots of things on my computer, but it was just “looking for printer.” I turned the computer off and on. Then I went back to the printer and played with its little buttons for a while. That’s a more complicated endeavor, but I actually re-confirmed the wireless connection and it said, “The printer is connected to the network.”

The computer didn’t know that. It was still looking.

Tim’s printer printed. Mine was “not found.”

You know what this means, don’t you? This means I have to enter Google-land and hunt for solutions. First, I have to figure out how to describe the problem. I have to decide which to type in first, the computer (Mac) or the printer (HP), because that determines which junk I will have to wade through to find the problem they both share. But they think the problem is the other guy’s fault so there are all sorts of blind alleys and dead ends.

This is all very depressing because basically you’re sifting through old posts, records of other people’s technical nightmares. They all ask panicky questions and get incomprehensible answers. Some of them are in such a state of crisis your own heart starts pounding.

If I finally end up with an HP printer not working on a Mac, then I have to include “suddenly” in my problem description – as in “suddenly can’t find printer” – and that’s where I finally find a solution: I need to delete my printer and then add it back in. Deletion is no problem, but when I try to add it back in, nothing shows up. “There are no printers on your network.”

It’s here, right here! You can see it, right? It's gigantic.

This was about three hours one night and then the printer printed a test page. Yay…. Short-lived. That was just a fluke in the universe. By now, I’d joined the HP Support Forum so I could ask my own question and not just pore through everyone else’s disasters.

Five hours the next night, and then I tried turning the router on and off. Victory!

I remember reading an essay once about a man trying to get his elderly mother to use a computer. Whenever it crashed, he knew to just turn it off and then on again, but this seemed so … wrong to his mother. She just couldn’t trust a machine or a problem that needed to be jiggled as a solution.

Why should turning things off and then on again work? Why is that even useful? Does it take those 30 seconds to heal? To calm down, take a breather? This is advanced technology – do heart machines need to be turned off and on, too? If there’s some sort of glitch that gets cleared, does that mean glitches are ever-present but just some of them erupt?

So now I have my printer/scanner back … but I lost Google. It’s there, and it lets me type in a search, but then it just sits there. Unmoving. So I had to search around – without Google – for a solution. I learned that if my time zone is incorrect on my Mac, Google won’t work. ??? So I made sure it showed I was in Alaska Standard Time, and it came back.

But now it’s gone again. And then it comes back. And then it’s gone.

I am NOT a tech dinosaur, but there is a problem in our Third Thirds: most of us don’t come with IT departments.

I am not a tech dinosaur!

One of the things I dislike about being in this Third Third is the popular perception that we don’t know our way around technology. I have created my own podcasts, mixed my own music on Garage Band, and created lots of iMovies. I use computer short cuts, know how to Skype, and update websites with HTML. But…

The Apple TV Remote Example

This is my Apple TV remote. A skinny silver thing with three buttons.

This is a test: Can you figure out how to watch Netflix with this? What buttons would you press to make it go?

The instruction booklet that came in the box lists six things you can do with your remote. I know about menu, pause, and play. That only went so far. Frustrated, I’d start pressing buttons and every now and then, a good thing would happen on the TV. But I was so busy pressing buttons, I couldn’t remember what did what.

Finally fed up, I Googled “Apple TV Remote,” and all sorts of advice popped up: how to rewind, fast forward, go into slow motion. Things like, “hold this button for 3 seconds while you do that to the other button” and other things happen. Who are these people, these good Samaritans who figure odd stuff out and then tell the rest of us on Google? Are they holding buttons on everything for 3 seconds, testing things?

Is it so hard for a manufacturer to include all this in the instruction booklet?

The Blog Bog

When I started this blog, I started it on Tumblr. I did the first two posts, and then friends tried to “follow” me. Uh, oh. They all wanted a post to go right into their inboxes, but with Tumblr, you have to “join” Tumblr. Then you have to create a screen name. If Tumblr already has someone with your name, they suggest rather bizarre new ones. That’s why I have a follower named pleasanttrashtyphoon and yourwhomeuniverse. She’s named both those things because the whole business was a little confusing. And nothing goes into your inbox; you have to go visit Tumblr and have things “fed” to you. Kind of like going to Facebook and having your friends’ posts in your feed.

But do any of us really need another thing to check? (See future post on wasting time…)

So I switched to Blogger and re-entered my first two posts. Picked out the template with the fonts and design and colors I wanted. But when I previewed it, it wasn’t what I’d picked. So I called Steve, whose What Do I Know? blog has been around for years with all sorts of interesting posts and features. Steve came over and we spent about 4 hours of Steve showing me around, teaching me new doodads. I’d forgotten that cutting-and-pasting usually messes up the HTML by adding all sorts of unwanted things to the template so I had a lot of clean-up. Hooray! My blog mostly looks the way it’s supposed to.

But there are still things I don’t understand. Like,

• why is the title of my post the nice blue I picked but older posts lose the color?
• And how do I exit a bulleted list to go back to my initial format?
• And why now, a few hours later, is the nice blue color now navy blue?

My daughter once showed me a game on her phone. No instructions. “What’s the objective of the game? How do we play? What are the rules?” “No need,” she said. Then she’d click on something, triggering something else happening, and we’d go to a new level. Miraculously! Finally after a couple of hours of this, I said,

 She said, “I was secretly Googling it whenever you were concentrating on the phone.”