The View From My 4 Inch Heels

I _____ my computer.

I have a love-hate relationship with my laptop computer. On a typical day, it is faithfully at my fingertips all my waking hours. It runs multiple programs simultaneously. It jumps from window to window with ease. It even beeps reminders at me so I don’t miss things. I love my computer. Well, that is, when it’s working.

Technology updates so quickly, and it’s easy for me to get behind. Frankly, I procrastinate updates because they never go smoothly. It seems there’s always a hiccup that causes data loss, speed loss or some other kind of loss for which I don’t have time. With new OS updates right around the corner, I knew I couldn’t delay much longer or risk falling into the abyss of “too many versions back.”

So, today was update day. I said a little prayer for everything to go well, knowing full well it wouldn’t, and clicked “install.” Sure enough, I got a crazy error message that locked up my computer. When I tried to hard restart, I got a series of flashing symbols that I’d never seen before. I figure the programmers that created that error message must have been thinking evil thoughts when they developed it: “Ha, we will really freak out the user when they see this on their screen!”  Not funny.

When I first started working on computers in 1985, I was programming in Pascal on an Apple IIe. The first program I created that actually worked was a Tic-tac-toe program. In the ensuing years as I studied computer programming (before I switched to communications), I never once had an evil error message thought, so I don’t appreciate the evil error messages that programmers create today!

Technology has come a long, long way since Pascal and Apple IIe computers. My knowledge and understanding, however, has not kept up. I just want it to work. All day, every day, doing what I want it to do, and sometimes even anticipating what I want it to do and just doing it without me asking.

As I type this on someone else’s computer that happens to be working, my computer is in lock down. Hard drive is backing up and our in-house IT guru, Josh Durham, has prepared a plan of attack to get me up and running. He’s generally successful, but in the event he isn’t, I’ll be checking in at the Apple store later today and I’ll camp out at the genius bar until they squeeze me into the schedule and get my computer back online.

Right now I hate my computer, and I hate that I’m so dependent on it. But I know my hate is only temporary, because later today when it is running, jumping and beeping, I will love it again. And I will love the genius behind the bar that will know which five keys to push simultaneously.

~Jane, President of JP Marketing