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Technology
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Welcome to technology hell. I’ll be your guide
today. Working out of a home office, it’s up to me to be
my office manager and IT guy. The problem is, at those jobs,
I stink. I don’t have the aptitude or the attitude required
to deal with the technology upon which I’ve come to depend.
Surely I’m not alone. If you know of any support group
for this problem, please let me know. Because my head is in
jeopardy of exploding. And then who would I turn to, to fix
that? And how long would I have to remain on hold, due to unusually
high call volume?
When I watch all these commercials selling a bright and breezy
techno-future, with information everywhere, connectedness connected
to connectedness, all effortless, intuitive, efficient and affordable,
I just have to wonder what world they’re talking about.
Surely not this one. Based on my experience of the last few
years, we are accelerating in quite the opposite direction.
Is this how it is for you? I’m sitting in a room, surrounded
by a computer, a phone, a cell phone, a fax machine, a copier,
a printer. The computer represents to me three distinct land
mines: it’s a computer, it’s the internet, and it’s
email. Between all of these devices and functions, I spend,
conservatively, an hour to three hours a day just trying to
get them running and/or keep them running. And that has been
the case every day for so many months that I truly cannot remember
a time when it wasn’t.
I remember a time long ago when things worked. Especially the
phone. The expectation of getting a dial tone was fulfilled
every single time you picked up the phone.
Now my phone line, or my other phone line that my fax is on,
is down every month, for some reason that the Ameritech people
simply won’t (or can’t) divulge. In February, both
those phone lines, plus my residential phone line, were down
a total of seven times. And February is a short month.
So okay, maybe that’s not such a big deal. I call Ameritech.
They send somebody out the next day, and my service is restored.
Yes, I was effectively out of business for a day or whatever.
Not the end of the world, but also not a problem I would have
faced a decade ago.
Where it becomes sanity-threatening is in the cumulative effect
of having a problem like the one above while at the same time
doing battle with some impossibly intertwined Telecommunisaurus
called EtropolisPhoenixRhythmsNorthPointMega- PathTelocityDirectTVAmeritech,
which, together, are (is?) responsible for providing me with
a high-speed line, internet service and email. You’d think
they were in some other business altogether. Like the design
and manufacture of institutionally-based insanity generators.
In April, the DSL service I signed up for last July finally
kicked in. Only to kick out a week later, for a couple of days.
Since then, I’ve found myself off-line three or four weekdays
every month. Which means I’m largely out of business 15
or 20% of the time. The only reason my clients aren’t any
madder at me than they are is that they’re experiencing
the same mess at their end.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to get the copier guy to come out
and fix the recently purchased reconditioned copier that made
about thirty clean copies and then went on the fritz.
Meanwhile, my computer chooses not to recognize the existence
of my printer every week or so.
Meanwhile, my cable TV company recently upgraded from analog
to digital which means a new remote and new cable boxes for
premium channels. It also means flipping channels, which used
to be like butter, is now like molasses. And it means the picture
vanishes and then re-digitizes itself for no apparent reason
every few minutes.
This is progress?
Meanwhile, I think I’m so clever. I got call forwarding
so I could forward my home office calls to my cell phone when
I’m out and about. Never mind that half the time the code
I punch in to forward the calls doesn’t take, leaving me
unknowingly in communicado. But the part about forwarding calls
to my cell phone that really chaps my cheeks is that, as it
turns out, my cell phone number was drawn from a pool of Crystal
Lake phone numbers (Why?) which means that every call I get
forwarded to my cell phone is a local call 15 or more miles
from me here in Evanston. Have you seen how much they charge
per minute for local calls beyond 15 miles? It’s obscene.
I have to factor in an extra $30 a month for those calls alone.
On top of my regular phone bill, my cell phone bill and my long
distance bill.
Meanwhile, in my mind, which still resides in the era when the
dial tone wasn’t an iffy proposition, my entire phone bill
is $30 a month.
In reality, it’s ten times that. TEN TIMES THAT. What happened?
At the rate things are going technology-wise, by the time all
this voice-activated-phone-computer-tv-merging-into-one-vision-of-intuitive-total-connectedness
business comes to pass, it will cost a year’s college tuition
per month for service that will actually be up and running maybe
an hour or two per month, late at night when it senses that
I‘m asleep.
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