Tech talk

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

I hate it when the tech that's supposed to make life easier does the opposite.

This morning, when I arrived at the library for my usual Monday routine--a mini-writeathon with fellow writer Robin Templeton--I was hoping for a productive day. I had several projects I hoped to finish, and a few focused hours at the library should have been perfect for that.

Until the tech rebeled.

First I discovered that the battery in my wireless mouse was dead. This is why I don't like wireless mice.  To me, a wired mouse that takes its power from the computer seems an infinitely better option. Of course, if I were at home, I would just go into my battery stash and replace it, but the damned thing waited to die till I was at the library. And while people may scoff at my overstuffed tote and purse, AA batteries are not usually one of the things I haul around. And the only reason I had a wireless mouse at all is that they were out of wired mice at the local Office Depot the last time I needed one in a hurry.  Made a note to order some this evening. Grr.

I figured I'd soldier on with the touchpad. But I'm not very deft with a touchpad. In fact, I loathe touchpads, and they sense this and treat me badly. While trying to navigate through the relatively simple steps needed to log into the library's WiFi, I somehow managed to put the laptop in airplane mode. I was previously unaware that my laptop even had an airplane mode, and although I looked up instructions on how to turn it off--by Googling "how to turn off airplane mode in Windows 10, dammit"--they didn't work.

And both of the things I wanted to work on--a newsletter article I was drafting and a synopsis I wanted to send to my editor--were stored in Google Docs. Connecting to WiFi was essential get getting my writing done here at the library.

My productive day wasn't starting off so well.

But I did not despair.

"Watch my stuff!" I stage whispered to Robin--remember, we were in the library. I ran across the street to the grocery store and bought batteries. I replaced the batteries in my mouse. And then, once I had a working mouse to work with, I did what the wiser and more skilled techies I knew would have done as the first step in dealing with the misbehaving laptop. No, I didn't throw it through the window. (That would have been noisy--remember, we were in the library.)

I rebooted.

And lo and behold! The laptop was no longer in airplane mode.

Sometimes it's the little things that make your day.

I settled down to be productive. I finished my draft article. I made useful tweaks and additions to the synopsis. Suddenly an idea came to me. Not just an idea. An Idea! One that would pull together the one part of my synopsis that I wasn't entirely happy with. I began typing joyously.

"Trying to reconnect" my computer told me.

Repeatedly.

I might have begun to whimper. You'd have to ask Robin. Or maybe I began to curse. This went on for what felt like several centuries.

I checked to see if I could get to other sites. Yes, I could, so it wasn't the library WiFi.

I went to an outage detector site. There are several of those: downdetector.com and isitdownrightnow.com, for example. These sites exist to answer that awful existential question: is the whole site down, or is it just me?  The site had a graph showing the number of Google outage reports they'd received over the previous 24 hours. The line on the graph went from at or near zero and then spiked so suddenly in the previous ten minutes that the line went almost vertical.

Okay, it wasn't just me. That was good, because it meant Google would be paying attention.

But it didn't guarantee that when Google Docs came back I'd have all the work I'd done in the past few hours.

Luckily Google Docs did return after a few more minutes. And my work was there. Of course, by this time all the tech woes had given me a stress headache. When Robin and I finished our morning's work and grabbed a quick lunch nearby, I griped to her. Then I went home beat the headache into submission with Excedrin and hot compresses before grabbing that Idea, working it into my synopsis. and emailing the synopsis off to my editor.

I love technology. I really do. I'm not sure I'd ever have gotten published if I had to do this writing thing with a manual typewriter, and the yellow legal pad and pen thing? No way.  Tech all the way.

I just wish I didn't have these days when I'm brutally reminded that the technology I love doesn't always love me back.

After reading this, you could probably use a cute picture of a puppy. Me too. That's why I put one at the top of this blog. Scroll back up there and relax. That's what I'm doing.

 

 

Comments

[Mark]

I hate days like that. Sorry your computer was out to get you.