I’ve Turned Into My Gran

Uh-oh.  I’ve become my Gran.  I’ve realised this week that I’m simultaneously terrified of and bamboozled by technology.  I’ve started to frantically press random buttons and flick switches without really knowing what they’re for, in the hope that any problem will be magically restored.  In the same way you’d kiss a grazed knee to make it better, it makes no practical sense whatsoever but at least you feel like you’re doing something.

On Monday, in a bid to ‘fix’ my laptop that kept freezing, I did the only sensible thing I could do.  I had a tantrum and slammed my hand down hard onto it.  Was my laptop miraculously restored?  No it wasn’t.  Instead I dislodged my hard drive and it’s now, in the repair man’s techno-speak, ‘totally goosed.’

On Tuesday, I pleaded with then swore at my iPhone, thinking that if it knew how cross I was with it, it would stop the funny business and connect to the internet like I wanted it to.  When my powers of negotiation failed, I’m ashamed to say I once more resorted to violence and whacked the b***ard thing repeatedly on my hand.

On Wednesday, I couldn’t get the old laptop that I’m now using to connect to the internet either.  Did I try to troubleshoot in a sensible, methodical way? Did I b****cks, I right clicked on every icon that looked like it might have some vague relationship with the internet.  Then I swore.  A lot.  Then I cocked up all the settings and couldn’t log back on again.

I phoned up my husband because I’d decided in a calm, non-hormonal way, that because it was his old work laptop, it was his fault.  After ringing his headquarters to get a password, we discovered by trial and error that pressing the ‘return’ key was all it took.  I could feel embarrassed but really, how was I expected to think of trying that?

Then, for laughs, it refused to charge up.  My husband, at work a safe 20 mile distance away, asked if I’d actually turned on the charger at the plug.  I gave him an appropriate response to his patronising sarcasm…and then double checked, because I know and he knows I’m not beyond such stupidity.  Turns out a little wiggle to the lead sorted it.  I know, I know, I’m a technological genius!

Yesterday, I decided that if technology was going to be a shit with me, then I’d bloody well ignore it for a day, see how it liked THAT.  Unbelievably it’s made not a jot of difference and today it’s having all sorts of fun winding me up once more.

This morning my toddler turned off the modem.  I turned it back on and it flashed up all sorts of scary messages, displayed exclamation marks in yellow triangles and beeped a lot.  My initial instinct was to cry and curl up in a ball but instead I typed in numbers off the modem in a likely looking place and ‘Hey Presto!’, I was once more ‘surfing the World Wide Web’.  (Is that still a trendy thing to say?  It was in 1993.)

I don’t know why technology is so mean to me.  I’m not a bad person.  I eat my greens.  I’m sometimes nice to my children.

I’ve started to entertain the thought that I’m possibly an easy target, you know, with the whole talking to inanimate machines thing and threatening them when they don’t do as I ask, so I can sort of understand.  If I was technology, I’d probably get my kicks out of winding me up, too.

Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂