Great Expectations

I’ve spent the better part of two days trying to work through tech problems – first on my blogger site and then on the several list serves I’m a member of. Here is my story. I expect for some of you this will ring a bell.

We expect things to work. It’s not our fault. We’ve been conditioned to believe this. Technology is our friend. We email and we post and we expect everything to work as planned. Most of the time it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. In an earlier time, we made allowances for human error. Today, however, humans are an add-on. They’re not part of the regular interface. We deal with automation when problems surface and we lack the essential human connection that we need to validate that – at the most fundamental level – we’re not stupid.

This Brave New World that Huxley could never have conceptionalized exists on a daily basis for those of us trying to connect on the internet. What happens when you get an error message? First reaction: I screwed up. Second reaction: Now what?

Today, in an effort to simply reply to an email I uninstalled one virus system and installed another. I installed Firefox to bypass Internet Explorer (IE). Will this help? I truly don’t know. What I do know, however, is that I want to connect with my online compadres and it has become a hit or miss affair.

Tomorrow I’ll resume my food postings and have faith that they’re getting to the people who want to read them. In the meantime, it’s 5:00 and I am going to inhale a very large glass of vino.