Availing Technology

I try to use technology to my advantage. It doesn’t always work, but I will try and sometimes try and try and try new gizmos, gadgets, thingamajigs, updates and programs. Many times I resort back to the tried and true methods that I can nearly do in my sleep after attempting to figure out the complexities of computers that seem to run our lives.

Take for instance my microwave oven. It has lots of handy dandy buttons to push for hundreds of different settings. Some new buttons illuminate as initial buttons are pushed for further defining cooking methods. I basically need a minute and a half for heating a cup for tea, or warming up pancakes for breakfast. That is about it, what all those other buttons do is a mystery to me even though I read the owners manual when I got the thing. Even though I am fluent in gibberish (I know this because a three year old babbling about imaginary friends is a conversation that I understand completely), I am not at all savvy about the written gibberish that comes in the form of instruction manuals. I think that I can read them upside down and backwards, would make as much sense as following the sentences.

Once an a while, not with any regularity at all, the microwave will stop cooking. Sometimes there a a few seconds left to the cooking cycle. The clock had been counting down to the end of the  cook and it goes dead. The digital read-out says to re-close door to finish the cycle. It does no good. Pushing other buttons has no effect, the read-out continues to say the door needs to be re-closed. The other night when dinner was about done on the stovetop, my tea was nearly heated in the microwave and the exhaust fan was running (also part of the microwave). With 23 seconds left on the clock, the microwave went silent. No heating, no exhaust. It stayed that way for about 10 minutes when it magically turned back on, finished the cooking cycle and the fan turned on. It was like the thing was possessed! I have been told by someone more tech-y than me that the microwave is searching for the Wi-Fi signal. Apparently the model that I got has remote capabilities. That is just dandy, but all I want is the heating part to work when I want it to and the fan to exhaust when I am cooking on the stove.

Today my technology flaw has to do with my computer. I have had an old laptop that I have been using for all the stories, blogging and tracking the firewood project from initial orders to printing invoices. I use it because it has never let me down (oh sure a few glitches along the line but most of them were user errors), until I wanted to write today’s story. Cannot get the thing to open the page to put in my password. So instead my sure fired, fancy pants, newer but seldom used computer has been pressed into service. So if things look a bit strange for a few days, it is just me re-learning some of the new things that I should have put to use years ago.

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