Technology Abuse

Growing up I remember playing Nintendo for hours. From Mario Brothers and Zelda to RBI Baseball and Golf, I played them all at one time or another. However, sometimes the game consul didn’t want to cooperate. Sometimes the color would be off, other times the screen would be fuzzy or only half read the data, and there were also times when it would just be a blank screen. Whenever one of these problems would occur, there were certain methods that would be used to fix the issues.

Some of them were very simple and gentle solutions like blowing the dust out of the game or making sure the game was in all the way. When those didn’t work things would get a little more aggressive which usually consisted of jamming the case above the game to hold it down, tapping the sides of the consul, and shaking out the game. When the issues persisted, the real aggression came out which usually ended up with the consul and game having the ever loving crap beaten out of it! Eventually, the Nintendo would succumb to the beating and give up, allowing us to play whatever game we wanted.

What ever happened to the technology you could beat the crap out of to make it work again?

This week that question kept running through my mind with the satisfying memories of slamming my fist into the Nintendo. It wasn’t really coming to mind earlier in the week with the snow, ice, power outages, and lack of internet. It was after all that when my email decided to be uncooperative and evaporate all correspondences since mid-November. In addition to the disappearance of my existence from the past three months, my computer did not want to talk to the server or let excel work properly forcing me to redo the same edits over and over again about three or four times.

It is amazing to think how limited you can be by technological difficulties. Even being sick and working at half the capacity of what I knew I could do, I wasn’t limited as much as when my computer turned against me. While I can fix many things I never experimented or had any desire to work on computers. Of course, I never had the patience for them either because when situations happen like this week is when they would need to be fixed but this is also when I wish I could just smack the crap out of the computer to make it work again.

WTF = Winter’s Tenacious February

I woke up this morning to the sound of a heavy rain slamming into the ground. The kind of rain that has a purpose. We knew it was coming from watching the news the night before but we didn’t expect the echoes that the weighted water would cause just outside our bedroom window. I don’t know if it was the expectation of what I would inevitably find on the other side of our apartment door or the rhythm of the rain, but I had a hard time getting out of bed.

After a quick shower, I poured a cold cup of coffee from the day before and cracked open the door. The giant drops were a change from the frozen flakes that have plagued us for the past month but as soon as my shoe splashed onto the sidewalk, I was wishing that it was snow. Carefully I placed my other foot on the concrete and before long my feet began to slide as I walked toward my car.

I have always found that the best way to determine the condition of the road is to walk on it. With this thought in mind, I walked across the parking lot and found that while there were slick spots, the asphalt wasn’t too bad. The trees however looked like they decided to take up yoga during the night. With branches bent in an unnatural fashion, it was inevitable that there was going to be limbs, if not entire trees, along, on, and across the roads this morning.

It was with this thought that I began my journey to the office and it wasn’t long before the traction control began flashing on the dashboard and the brakes were pumping at the end of the driveway. Within a quarter mile of the apartment building the slalom began as I joined a line of cars weaving back and forth around trees on our way to the highway. The important thing is that the tires retained their grip and people kept their distance so we all managed to make it through the inoperable traffic lights, down the road, and onto the Schuylkill Expressway.

With few cars on the road, the ride to the office was pretty quick. While there was nothing eventful across the three lanes heading eastbound, my peripheral vision was overloaded with the constant motion of bending, breaking, and falling branches all along the highway. Nothing impacted the commute and I pulled into the office in about the same amount of time that it usually takes in the morning. The only difference in my arrival was second guessing my usual parking spot under one of the trees. I wasn’t about to take the risk when there were plenty of spots out in the open.

And this is how the long day of power outages and failed internet connections started. What seemed uneventful in the beginning of the day and was pretty safe, has been a bigger PITA than a foot of snow on the ground. And this is, by no means, an end to the winter weather for the week.