Ongoing War with Technology -Part 3

Although I have an ongoing war with technology, I fear I am losing, possibly because I lose most battles.  Fortunately, we have a son who can come into the fray and rescue me.  But I fear he thinks I’m a complete do-do bird most of the time. 

               Recently I’ve had three incidents with technology that have left me feeling battered, bruised, and bewildered.

               The first was Instagram.  I manage two different Instagram accounts for two local businesses.  This is a really easy as all I do is post a picture every day of something the store sells on that store’s account.  Usually I add a cute message with it about the product.  It takes all of four minutes to do both stores. 

               So it really ticked me off last week when I couldn’t get a picture to post.  The little circle would appear in the middle of the picture like it was processing, but would never finish.  I got online and found several alternatives to correcting this “freezing” of Instagram. 

First, they suggested I wait a while and try later.  (Thanks for that insight!) I waited several whiles, and it never worked.

The second suggestion was to delete the accounts and start over.  Pah.  No way was I doing that!

The third suggestion was to power off my phone completely and when I “re-booted” it, it would likely work.  I was skeptical, but in fact, that did work.  So it only took me a day and a half to post two little pictures.

The second escapade I had with technology was also on my phone.  Every once in a while, I get included in a group text by someone I know, but with other people whose numbers are not in my contact list (usually because I don’t know them).  This means my phone – and I’m sure it’s a feature I’ve installed inadvertently and don’t know how to eliminate – will not allow me to view or delete texts from these “unknown” numbers.  So the little green icon on my phone for text messages has a little red number “2” showing, indicating that there are two unread messages. But I can’t see these messages, so I can’t delete them.

I’ve learned two ways to eliminate this problem on my phone. One is to hurl the phone into the toilet and flush, but that’s not practical.  So I tried the rebooting and guess what?  It worked!  I was able to view the original text and delete the strand.  I suspect this was fluke, but into every war a little luck must fall.

My last battle was over a power outage.  We had one of those little blink-out power outages – the television went off, both computers, and all the digital clocks (except the one on the stove, which made no sense).  We got everything back easily except one computer.  It would not turn on.

We tried unplugging every cord from the back of the computer and replugging them.  Nothing.  We unplugged the cords from the hard drive and replugged them in.  Nothing.  We took them out of both computer and hard drive and then reinserted.  Nothing. 

Finally, I called our son and asked for any advice – short of buying a new computer – he might have.  This is what he said:  “Look at the hard drive.  Is the light on?  If not, turn the on/off switch to ‘on.’”

You know what happened, right?  Turns out, turning a machine to “on” will often turn it on. You’d think I’d learn some of these tricks by now, but I guess it’s all just too technical for me.

Is this the way our parents felt about remote controls for televisions?     

1 Comment

  1. JOHN LLEWELYN

    as usual this was a hoot to read – nothing drives me crazier than my “new iphone” – given to Carol and I as a Christmas gifts 2020 – what a hoot – am still learning all the new tricks of this thing – one new deal is the ability to get a lot of the computer emails and such and delete the nonsense ones quickly — also, when whisking away the time sitting in the van awaiting passengers – I can play WORD SCAPES and improve my vocab – HA HA – use this as a competition with Carol often to while away the time!!

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