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Friday, September 3, 2010

Life Error

It started with the car battery. A couple of weeks ago, it died. Just like that. It's not surprising considering we had to jump it on two different occasions for leaving the panel lights on. It was a matter of time but truly, the timing sucked. Then again, the timing always sucks when you're on a low budget.

Of course in the program of life, when it rains it pours - that was just the spark that fueled the fire. Following that, I dropped my detested iPhone and cracked the screen. It still worked, if you consider a phone that no one can hear you as working, but the cracked screen rubbing against my ear was physically annoying as well.

Then the whole water boarding incident happened with my laptop. Rather than pay the "anywhere from four hundred to seven hundred dollars" it would cost to fix it, we swapped the hard drive to another household laptop. Now it doesn't shut down when it's unplugged but for some reason, the battery only lasts about an hour before it needs to be recharged. Can you say, high maintenance?

And since misfortune comes in threes, my digital camera started giving me attitude lately. I went to turn it on the other day and the screen flashed a "Lens Error" message. I've noticed in the world of technology, all a device has to say when it doesn't feel like working is "Error." It's a passive-aggressive message when you think about it because it's not blaming you directly but it's not giving you any options of what to do about it either.

Instead, you're going through the motions of repeating the same actions like an insane geek performing button ballet - hold CTRL-Shift-C while booting your computer with the pointer on the same hand as the pinky that's up your butt.

Seriously, I'm just about ready to go Pilgrim and get rid of all these electronic hoo-ha's. But you know I won't.

If anything, I've learned something from all this: electronics, single-handedly shaped society to be the wanton consumer. There was a time when the people who fixed your mechanical piece-of-shit charged less than the people who put it together but that's simply not the case anymore. Why would I pay seven hundred dollars to "possibly" fix an old computer when a newer, sleeker, faster one would cost me nine?

It's all about upgrade. Either way, you're getting it.

All things considered, I'm lucky that this funk my life is contained to trivial things like a dying battery. Laptops, iPhones, cameras...they can all be replaced. And though this old brain is getting too cluttered to learn yet a new menu and change settings and so forth, things could be worse - I'll count my lucky stars until I get the app to do it for me.

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