When it comes to me and my relationship to technology, I would say that I am somewhere in the middle of the pack. I’m definitely not on the level of my husband and his engineering, techie friends, who routinely sit around and discuss how easy it would be for them to wire together every single electronic apparatus in the Universe, which they could then control merely by blinking their eyes and activating the computer chip embedded deep within their brain. Or something like that. I tend to tune out whenever the conversation starts to sound like this:
“…486SQLSAPRAMGB1.oGIG64XP…”
(Or whenever they decide that they simply cannot continue living unless they fire up Google Earth right now.)
But I am also at a different level than the people who look at me with the awe and wonder normally reserved for someone who has, for example, just discovered the cure for cancer, when I reveal to them that I own a website whose web address is my very own name.
All this is to say that when it comes to a rough estimate of my ability to troubleshoot computer problems, I would probably come in only slightly ahead of rocks and dryer lint. And that is unfortunate, because problems do tend to crop up, which I don’t understand because (as far as I know), it’s not like computers are sentient, organic beings who are constantly evolving.
So the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is this: spirits. Not so much evil spirits, as spirits who just like to mess with me.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I have a number of different email addresses which each have their own cyber mailbox. Each mailbox has its own name and password, both of which are a completely random string of letters and numbers. I have carefully entered in this electronic gibberish, checked the option of, “Remember this on this computer”, and then placed them in a safe location just in case I ever have to refer to them again.
But I needn’t have bothered, because every 3 or 4 months The Spirits get together and have a conversation that apparently goes a little something like this.
Spirit Of Mixing It Up Just For The Hell Of It: “Uh oh, it appears that Jenny has been receiving all of her email with no problems for the past 4 months. We’ve gotta do something about that.”
Spirit Of Kicking The Shit: “Yeah, that, and I’m really bored.”
And so the next time I log on I will get a message like this:
“Please enter the password for mailbox q76Gp809rt7.”
But I don’t know the password, because that is not the name we assigned to the mailbox. We named the mailbox “r290rUbgy4”. I don’t have any information for mailbox “q76Gp809rt7”.
Spirit Of Mixing It Up Just For The Hell Of It: “That’s right, because we made up that mailbox, and we made up the new password, and you will never, ever, ever, ever be able to find that information, no matter what you do!”
Spirit Of Kicking The Shit: “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Fun times.
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