Why you will HATE your new computer…
With Cyber Monday and the holiday rush for end of year specials odds are you or someone you love will have a new laptop, tower, tablet, smart phone, smart tv, xbox or other x-file device in their carpal tunnel hands by the New Year. I’m pretty sure the holiday blues stem from the ripple effect of the technology woes that are more contagious than the winter flu bug which also has better odds for recovery.
The guy who just cut you off on the freeway? He just tried to import his address book in his new android and lost his girl friends phone number and the rest of his little black book. The sales clerk who can’t figure out how to input the code for your half off coupon can’t set her favorite shows to record on her new “smart” tv and anything she does watch is all stretched out and blurry. Your boyfriend hasn’t said you look nice since sometime last month because he is still trying to find the serial number for his Creative Suite v.X without buying the whole package all over again. And Aunt Bessie, bless her, just got a new kindle from her grand daughter and can’t find a pair of eye glasses that will work right with her new technology reader so don’t expect a check in your Christmas card this year because she’s not speaking to anyone in the family anymore.
With laptop prices as low as they are, well meaning friends and family will be gifting little bytes of terror to their loved ones without realizing that the side effects may include: confusion, unusual thoughts or behavior, difficulty breathing, pounding heartbeats, depression, rage, turrets, suicidal thoughts … or most likely homicidal thoughts directed at the giver of the tidyings of comfort and joy.
How hard can it really be? Its just a new shiny toy right? Why is it so hard to turn on and dive in?
Well, to start, it probably has a new operating system or God forbid a touch screen! All of your little brain cheats that remembered how to find your files have changed. Everything will seem counter intuitive and well above your TIQ (technology intelligent quasi-irrelevant). Even if you do manage to find a browser it won’t be the one you are familiar with, nor will any of your bookmarks, password cookies or auto-complete site history be available to you. At once you will realize that you don’t know chit about anyone one. Why? Because you trusted the Google gods to keep all track of things ten years ago you would have spent 10 seconds to put in your long term memory. I actually only know ONE phone number of my THREE children by memory … and sadly that one is no longer in service because she got a new phone last year. So if my android croaks I’ll have to wait for people to contact me … which means I’ll only hear from solar panel marketers, the occasional politician and my college phone-a-thon who hopefully I can try and bribe to tell me the phone number of my two daughters who also went to my Alma mater.
If you are a technology expert you may spend the next week (month) downloading new anti-virus-malware-trojan-firewalls, syncing your master/slave music libraries from the host of clouds that keep your tunes locked behind bars, transferring your software licenses, finding all of your daFonts, importing histories, migrating email from accounts you can’t remember let alone passwords you didn’t write down in your uber safe should be encrypted post-it-note collection which has ostensibly wallpapered your workstation.
If you didn’t spend over half of your life working in a technology field, you will most likely forgo migrating your data. Except for your pictures! You have to keep all of your half a terabyte of jpgs, pngs and random phone movies you took over the lifespan of your last technology mistake. You’ve told yourself countless times that you will go through and delete the ones where your finger was over the lens, the flash didn’t go off and all you see is bury haze or the porn which you insist you have no idea how it ended up on your hard disk in the first place and try to pass it off on the stealth smut virus.
If first dates were as hard as setting up a new technology gadget no one would ever get married. The learning curve alone would ward off any prospects. But in fact every new relationship comes with the same over head in terms of making things work in our unworkable areas of compromise and companionship. So as I look at my new HP Envy which already seems like an oxymoron out of the box as my fingers stumble on the control zone and I can’t find where the hidden button clicks should be … I realize that the next few weeks the roller coaster of re-installations will take me on a joyless ride over the river and through the woods to laptop utopia we go. All the while testing the neuroplasticity of this old dog brain and its ability to learn new touch screen tricks. The new computer will be my best Zen teacher in detachment, patience, compassion and gratitude. That is if I don’t throw it out the Windows! But don’t tell my boy friend that I’m disencharmed because he was the thoughtful family member who bought me this blessing in disguise for his very generous gift to me this holiday season. After all its the thought that counts not the items remaining to be copied. 
p.s. To my grammar friendly friends and those of my children who don’t always know I am making chit up … I fully realize the likes of disencharmed may not be an actual word. But as with most of my prose it sounded good in my head and having good sounds in my head is what keeps a smile on my face, well that and a sweet redneck who puts up with me technology tirades.
