Singing the Technology Blues

Two of the things I’m working on in my spiritual life are anger and impatience. They were both tested today by inanimate objects.

This afternoon, as I was merrily working from home, my Windows-based work laptop suddenly decided that certs were for wussies.

I watched in helpless horror as one by one my e-mail client, my IM, and then my VPN connection all went down.

The help desk had me up and running in about twenty minutes.

The thing is, this happens all the time.

The help desk always gets it fixed eventually, though the time range can run as long as two hours.

Nobody in IT is working on discovering the root cause of the problem because “it only effects a small number of users”.

Thanks.

The time lost to work is irritating, but the the fact that I’ve totally lost concentration and flow on whatever I was actually working on is infuriating.

Then, this evening, I was sitting on a park bench merrily dictating into my iPhone. I’m working on a presentation on worldbuilding for a local writers’ group that I’m giving later this week.

I’ve been having some trouble getting it together, but inspiration struck while I was walking in the park, and I wasted no time in trying to get it all down.

And then, I watched in helpless horror as, in mid-sentence, my battery dropped from 65% to 10% to 1% to dead.

So much for getting my inspiration recorded.

When I got home, I plugged in the phone, and it went from redline to 40% in about forty seconds.

Infuriating.

Ryng’s Rule:

The usefulness of any tool is directly dependent upon its reliability.

By this measure, most computer-based devices are not terribly useful.

And if you think I’m alone, just Google “computer frustration”.