Amy and the No Good, Very Bad Week

So it's been a couple weeks since I've blogged.  One of those weeks was due to technology.  The rest of them... well I have no excuse.

So a couple weeks ago my microwave went out.  Not it's fault, just got old (and somehow melted a giant hole in the inside.  Not a real stresser, for the most part microwaves do what they're supposed to.  I was even thinking about what great technology it is and how I was going to praise it on my blog the next day.  We replaced it that evening and, conveniently, it chose to go out in the middle of a big Sears appliance sale.  Got it home and went to bed.  The next morning my kids are making breakfast and I hear this horrible rattling sound, so I go to the kitchen and the microwave plate is trying to rattle it's way out of the microwave.  I stopped it and made sure it was on the rollers and turned it back on.  It rattled for a second and then started making a noise that sounded like a freight train.  The neighbor kids said "It's supposed to sound like that."  So I boxed it up and  we took it back, but it was the last one so we had to go 35 miles to another Sears to get one and I had to go another day without it. Since I have built my life around a microwave it was a little inconvenient, but it happens.

Now for the no good, very bad part.  Like I said before, I'm studying interior architecture and am in the middle of a construction documents class.  I try to get my homework done early in the week so I can get feedback and correct anything before the deadline.  Except for this week.  Do you remember a few weeks ago when I spent an eternity at office max trying to get my plans printed?  Well I got those out and laid them out on my drafting table and started to work on remodeling the building.  I was about an hour into it when I realized that I had way to much room.  I got out my architect scale and the 1/4 scale was NOT a 1/4 inch.  When they printed it, they didn't print it as is but fit it to the page.  This meant I had to drive 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back to have it redone and then start completely over. This put me a day behind - still doable.  (And I'll blame human error on that one.)

The next day, as I sit down at my computer and log into my class, pop up ads keep flashing across my screen along with dire warnings that my computer is about to blow up if I don't go to a certain website and fix it.  In spite of my husbands diligence in teaching me how to avoid it,  I had acquired some malware when I updated Adobe Flash a few days before that and even though he took it off immediately, it was now taking over my computer.  The only solution was to back up my computer and then nuke it and start over.  When I tried to log into my class the next morning, their website was down.  This put me 2 more days behind.  One snafu I can recover from, the two of them in the same week had me scrambling to get my plans drawn and turned in on time.

Therefore, I couldn't blog because I had no computer and by the time I did, who has time to blog?

This week has gone the same - still a little further behind than I would like to be but I can catch up, right?  My husband goes out of town on business and Monday morning I get on my computer that he has restored and none of my documents are there.  He supposedly reloaded them from the back-up but... they aren't there! And he has the drive he backed it up on with him.  So again, for 3 days until he comes home, I have no computer.  But I get out my plans on Monday night, which I have had copied before I move to the next step and unroll them and the copy place has only given me half the copies and kept my original. Ahhhh!!!! This means another 1 hour trip to the copy place to retrieve it and I have to wait until the next day to work on my plans.  Again, this was human error and not the fault of technology, but we have come to rely on it so much that when we don't have it we become paralyzed.

I think I'll just read a book...

When I was a kid, if I wanted to watch tv I just walked over to it and turned it on.  Then I turned a dial to the channel I wanted.  There were three.  If I wanted to watch Sesame Street I had to flip a little switch on the back of the TV and turn it to UHF.  Granted, it was in black and white - we didn't get our first color TV until I was 10.  One day my kids were complaining that a Shirley Temple movie they were watching was boring because it was black and white.  I told them that when I was their age, everything was in black and white.  My four year old looked at me wide-eyed and said, "You mean the world was black and white?"

If we wanted to watch a movie we had to go to the theater, or wait for the TV version.  Then along came VCRs and videos, opening up a whole new world to us. On the weekends we would rent a VCR and 2 or 3 movies. In a few years, we owned our own VCR.  My little sister watched Cinderella until it broke.  When I started my own family we started collecting Disney movies for the kids, that was 90 minutes a day of uninterrupted housework. I even knew how to hook one up to the tv all by myself.  By the time my kids were 2, they could put a video in and play it all by themselves.  Life was good.

Videos were bulky and they took up a lot of shelf space.  The kids never put them back in their cases when they were through watching them and I was constantly hunting down matched sets.  Then DVDs came along.  I still had to hunt for the cases and put them away, but it was a smaller mess.  I tried everything to control it.  I put them on a high shelf. I locked them up.  I confiscated them.  I bribed the kids.  I threatened them...

Six years ago my husband and resident geek, Karry, decided the way to solve this was to put all of our movies on the computer.  Perfect solution, right?  We just put the originals in a box in the attic and I can repurpose the cabinet they were stored in.  No more mess, no more scratched DVD's.  Oh, how I long for the days when watching TV was simply turning on a switch, or when I wanted to watch a movie all I had to do was put a disc in the DVD player and turn on the tv.  I imagine it's a lot like when an empty nester tells you that some day you will miss all the noise and the clutter.

Now watching TV requires a PhD.  We bought a Roku - still not even sure what that is.  Then the Apple TV was the end all be all.   For a while we had both.  To further complicate things we also had an xbox hooked up. Just watching tv was complicated enough.  I rarely watch tv, so I can never remember which setting is for tv, which is for the xbox, which one is the dvd player, and so on.  If there was a kid around, any age, they could do it for me.  But now adding the computer to the tv is a lethal combination.  Twice when Karry was away on business I had a bunch of friends over to watch a movie, and both times we couldn't get the movie to work or I couldn't find it.  Even with Karry, cursing me under his breath on the other end of the phone walking me through it.  It's on the Apple tv, no it's on the Roku, it's on a DVD in the attic.  I don't remember which one, but one of them I had to flip through the movies one at a time to get to the W's.

I finally gave up tv all together.  Between the tivo, the apple tv, the roku, the computer, and the xbox I could never remember what was what.  If I wanted to watch just the tv,  I had to turn it on, stand on my head click my heels three times and recited an incantation to get to the correct screen. That is, if I could locate the remote and if it still had it's batteries.  If I wanted to watch a movie, it required two remotes, a child to help me through the process, another child to reset the thing-a-ma-jig and some kind of animal sacrifice, and then if the tv gods were in a good mood I might get to watch my show.

Finally after years of complaints, I asked him to make me a manual to refer to, so I could remember how to watch my show.  He decided to make life easier for me. He has the perfect solution this time.  Now I have one remote control that turns on the tv and takes me to a screen where I can select netflix, hulu, tv, any of our movies, you name it.  It does everything but give me a foot rub.  Things were great for the first two days.  Then one day our internet was slow, so I couldn't get to Hulu. Another day it didn't come on at all, and yesterday we had no sound for some reason. It seems like when it comes to electronics we've just come to accept that they will only work 75% of the time, and if we just wait it out, it will work in two hours, or tomorrow.  And we put up with the inconvenience because they make our lives easier.  Do they?

A Love/Hate Relationship

In order to be fair I planned to post a positive story on technology.  I'm studying architecture and there are so many technological resources available.  I am in an online class and at first I was skeptical.  After getting my first degree in the 80's I just couldn't see how I could get the benefits of live interaction with my classmates and instructor online but I've been very impressed.  In some ways I actually get more guidance and help this way.  I can also attend my class from anywhere that has an internet connection - the hospital, on vacation, my mom's house, my bed, Mcdonald's parking lot... The internet is a valuable resource for finding materials for class projects, rather than having to hoof it all over town, and I can scan and submit assignments from the comfort of my home office rather than sending them snail mail from the post office.  Way to go technology!!

So this week I needed to make copies of some plans from a pdf file on 24x36 paper.  First of all the connection was slow for some reason on the university's end and the system was getting ready to go down for maintenance so I downloaded my files the night before so I could still work while the system was down.  It took 45 minutes to download a file - still faster than drawing it myself, or having it mailed to me.  But at the end of the 45 minutes, all I had were partial files and I had to start over.  But - oh yeah - the system was down.  This put me a day behind schedule because I still had to download the files.

I finally got my files downloaded and stored on my handy little flash drive and drove the 30 minutes it takes to get to the print shop.  This time I used office max because they are open late and I needed some office supplies as well.  I stood in line at the counter for 30 minutes while the employee and the manager messed with an uncooperative copy machine in an attempt to help the person in front of me. Apparently only my presence in the room is necessary to cause a malfunction.  Fortunately my two youngest daughters had full stomachs and were looking forward to a visit to the toy store so they were on their best behavior.  They should put a bench near the copy counter, however.  They made do with the wire shelf under my cart.  Finally it was my turn.  Yippee - everything went smoothly and I got my copies.  Then I walk through the store and picked up several items and got in line at the register.

It was one of those snake lines with several people ahead of me and only one register was open.  It was slowwwww moving.  I shopped the clearance shelf by the line while I waited, adding two more items that I probably don't really need to my cart.  Maybe a slow line is their marketing strategy.  My girls were getting restless and starting to dance in the aisle but I still had the toy store as incentive so I was able to rein them in.

Finally it was my turn and I put everything on the counter for her to ring up.  Then I scanned my debit card.  Nothing.  Tried again.  Nothing.  She did some kind of voodoo and moved my order to the register next door.  I scanned my debit card.  Nothing. We called the manager who rebooted both registers, but this meant I had to get everything out of my shopping bags and ring them up again.  The guy behind me left, muttering something under his breath.  My girls, too tired to dance, laid down on the floor by my feet sighing as loudly as possible.  I made them get up.  I scanned my debit card. Nothing.  Just more evidence that computers hate me.  Or that I'm cursed as I have suspected all along.  We moved to a third register and the manager typed something in.  We had to scan my items a third time.  Finally it worked.

90 MINUTES!!! to make 12 copies and purchase 8 - make that 10 - items.  Fortunately the girls were so tired of shopping that not even the toy store could engage them.  We were in and out in 5 minutes.  We paid cash.

Date Night

In some ways technology has improved communication for the better, but in some ways we are less in touch with people.  For example, sending a text to someone is fast and simple, they can look at it when they have time to spare, and you can send it in just a few seconds without a lengthy, chatty phone call.  I can send a quick "I'm in the parking lot" to my kids without having to go in and get them, or text my husband a quick grocery list.  On the other hand, we lose some good old fashioned opportunities for one on one conversation and sharing of ideas, or even the benefits of just listening to someone or having them listen to you.

So lets talk about date night.  My husband and I have a policy of going out together once a week.  It used to be just the two of us, but that has expanded over the years.  Now its just the two of us and whatever gadget is poplular at the moment.  It started with an iPod touch.  We would sit across the table from each other and talk while he played solitaire.  Then, he graduated to an iPad, which he carried with him everywhere.  I teased him that it was attached by an umbilical cord because he never went anywhere without it.  Since I felt ignored, I started bringing my iPod so I had something to do while he was playing his game.  That way, I didn't feel left out.

Over time it evolved to other games, and then he started reading.  He says he can read and carry on a conversation at once, but it's like having a conversation in slow motion and pretty painful.  But I compensated by bringing along Candy Crush to fill the long pauses.

Next I noticed he had headphones on - all the time!!  (or a lot of the time) so I have to get his attention somehow before I can say anything to him because he can't hear me.  The last and final straw is movies.  Now he's not just listening to background music, but his eyes are required also.  It's like living with a ghost.  He's there, but not really.  He says it helps him cope with his chronic back pain.  So how do I cope with his coping mechanisms?  I have my iPad to keep me busy while I'm feeling left out of his world.  I just have to wonder, are we going to wake up one day and realize "Who needs human interaction?  All we really need is our devices."  Just sayin'.

I Just Want to Turn on a Light, Part II

Phase II of his crusade to save electricity began several weeks ago. (Possibly due to of my lack of support for Phase I?)  He thoughtfully attached a remote control for the lights downstairs to the wall at the top of the stairs.  He also started buying blue-tooth LED lightbulbs and installing them one at a time, but didn't share his plan with the rest of us.  So when one of them wasn't working for some reason, my 16 year old son, thinking the bulb was burned out and being proactive for the first time in his life, replaced it with a regular bulb from the closet.  I thought my husband was going to have a coronary when he found out that he'd thrown away a $54 light bulb.  My son, daring to say what I was only thinking, looked at him and said, "Who pays $54 for a light bulb?"

So now that I can control my lights in the basement with a switch like the rest of the world, a lot of my stress was alleviated, but only temporarily.  He eventually put one of his light bulbs in the living room without any negative impact until last week when he went on a business trip and I was home alone with the kids.  True to it's electronic nature something started going haywire with his remote control switch.  I'm sitting in the living room one evening visiting some friends and I tell the kids to take all their noise to the basement.  On their way down they find that if they hit the power button on the remote switch the family room lights turn on and the living room light turns off.  This leaves me with two options.  I can sit in the dark in the living room and visit in peace and quiet, or I can try to visit with the lights on amidst the cacophony that always accompanies my kids when they are together.  

The next morning my little girls were sleeping in the family room because the heat upstairs in their bedroom wasn't working.  This time when I got up at 6am and turned on the light in the living room, with the regular switch, the lights came on in the basement, waking them both up way too early and creating two little tired monsters that I had to put up with for the rest of the day.  This was the first day into his trip so we spent three days playing light switch roulette and holding our breath as we waited to to see which lights turned on... or off.   On the bright side - no pun intended - my life is never boring.

I Just Want to Turn on a Light!

My geek husband is on a crusade to computerize everything in the house and recently his focus has been on the lights.  First it was the light switches, and while its pretty cool that I can turn off an upstairs light from my bedroom it comes with its disadvantages.

We have a family room in our basement, and it's fairly large so there are 4 overhead lights.  I also have to walk through the family room to get to my laundry room, and with 6 kids I spend a lot of time going to the laundry room.  I also spend a lot of time turning off lights because I haven't found the right motivation to get my kids to do it on their own.  They did great one year when we told them we would take them to Disney World if we saved money on the electric bill, but once they won the prize it was no longer in the forefront of their minds and we're back to the status quo.  

So hubby decides that the way to solve our electricity problem is bluetooth switches.  He set it all up downstairs so that we could go to an app on our iphones and choose a lighting scenario from a list of possibilites.  For example, if we're watching tv, this light will come on, but will be fairly dim so that it's easier to see the tv.  If I happen to be crocheting while I watch tv then I can choose this one so that I have one light on directly over my head where I sit.  We can choose this one if we need more light on this side of the room, another if we are on the other side of the room.  Or we can turn them all on full strength. An other option is all of them at 50%  if we don't need as much light, and so on and so on.  He also put my laundry room on this same system.  He taped the switches on so that we wouldnt forget and turn them off, rendering our app useless.  

I find the whole thing ridiculous.  Although he has his phone permanently attached to him with an umbilical cord, if I'm at home mine it is probably in the last place I used it.  And, if I can't get a kid to remember to flip a switch, how am I going to get them to use the app on their ipod to do it.  So, the question is, is this a better method?

Let's do multiple choice. 

1. I'm at the top of the stairs and I can see that there are lights on in the basement. Should I:

a) walk down one flight of stairs and turn them off? 

b) go to my bedroom, pick up my phone and enter the passcode. find the app which I can't remember the name of, select the family room from the menu options, and choose a scenario based on the task at hand.  In this case nobody is down there so I want all the lights off.

2. I need to do some laundry so I grab the hamper by both handles and lug it down the stairs.  Which is better:

a) turn on one light switch in the family room so that I can see to navigate around any legos that may have been left on the floor, then flip the switch in my laundry room and put a load in the washer, turning off the switches on my way back upstairs. 

b) plan ahead and get my phone out, enter the passcode, find the app (what was it called again?), select from the menu, turn on one light in the family room, then another in the laundry room. Then I can lug the hamper down the stairs and put a load in the washer, remembering to go back to my phone, enter the passcode, find the app and turn off the lights.  

Ok, one more

3.  It's dark outside and one or more of the kids is out.  Do I:

a) Turn on the porch light so they can see to get back in the house

b) Just let the motion detection lights by the garage come on as they walk by and figure that's good enough to get them to the door.

c) Set up a timer so that the porch light and the motion detection lights come on at dusk and turn off at midnight.

In reality, this is the way it goes. 

1. I see a light on downstairs. I'm can't turn it off by the switch because it's taped up, and I'm not sure where I last used my phone so I leave it on, counting on the fact that we have energy efficient bulbs.  

2. I grab the hamper full of clothes, manhandle it down the stairs with both hands.  The family room light is still on because I never bothered to turn it off with my phone, then I get to the laundry room and realize that the light switch is taped and I forgot to bring my phone with me, so I have to go back upstairs and hunt down my phone, enter the passcode, find the app, select from the menu...  This time I bring my phone with me so I can turn out the light when I'm done, half the time forgetting about it and leaving it on top of the dryer until the next time I need my phone and can't remember where I left it.  

3. Now #3 sounds like a great idea. right?  But every day my porch light and motion detection lights are on in broad daylight and because the switch is taped I yell into his office "the outside lights are on" and he responds with "I need to fix the timer" and the next day I go outside and the lights are on in broad daylight.  Not to mention the fact that the timer has them turning off just when they need to be on. This goes on for weeks until I finally snap and rip the tape off the switch and turn them off the old fashioned way.  Then I hear about how he's trying to simplify our lives and save us money and I'm not being very supportive and how can he expect the kids to do it when I am not setting the example.  During this same period of time our power bill went up by about 20% and I have to wonder: is it a coincidence. or are the two related?

Are We Really Better Off?

Technology and I seem have a love-hate relationship and always have.  But before I get started, let me give a little background information.  I was born in 1970, a unique time in history, at the bridge that connects two eras, and I have a foot planted on each side of the bridge.  It was just after the moon landing, but before the age of calculators, cassette tapes, and personal computers.  In spite of the social upheaval of the 60's and 70's, it was still a world much like the one in which my parents grew up, whereas my children were born into a completely different world.  We watched a black and white TV with an antenna that brought us 3 channels which turned to snow when we ran the vacuum or the mixer, and played the National Anthem just before it shut off at 11pm. Sometimes we had to hold the antenna just right to get good reception and we frequently had to adjust the vertical hold so that the picture didn't roll. Our telephone was tied to the wall by a cord and we had a party line so we could listen to our neighbors phone conversations.  When we took pictures we waited at least a week to get them back from the developer, crossing our fingers that we got some good ones, and our "delete" button was the trash can.  We reheated leftovers in the oven or on the stove top, and we listened to vinyl records.  My Disney "videos" were books with pictures and a record player that let out a ding when it was time to turn the page.

By the time I went to college, we had a computer lab where we could type our papers on a black and white screen, save them to a floppy disk and print them on a dot matrix printer, but typewriters were still widely used and just a few short years later my husband was taking classes online over the internet.  So the world my children were born into is one where you can record your show and skip the commercials, pause it for a bathroom break, and even rewind it if you missed something they said.  If we missed a show we had to watch the TV Guide for the rerun. They were born knowing how to insert their games into the cd-rom drive and start their programs.  They never had the benefit of an obnoxious brother making kissing noises into the phone on the other line, having to comb through dusty old scientific journals at the library to do a research paper, or being able to recite all the jingles learned from the ads on TV.  They have very little experience with the concept of a world without video games, cell phones, the internet, streaming videos, cable tv, itunes, SIRI, etc.

So here I am, a child of both worlds stuck in the computer age, married to a geek who imposes all the new, everchanging technology on me, claiming it will make our lives better, when mostly all it does is frustrate me and complicate my life.

Growing up, my dad owned his own business so I had a PC in my home from about the age of 15.  I typed my research papers on it, and while the concept of being able to edit my writing right there on the computer rather than having to write and rewrite and again rewrite each draft by hand seemed like a good one, but in practice it didn't quite live up to my expectations.  Any one with a computer knows that they often don't do what they are supposed to.  My dad would tell me "computers don't do anything that you dont tell them to," but I'm pretty convinced they just hate me.  Typing a paper on the computer always took as much time as it would if I just wrote the darn thing by the time I rebooted several times, lost my document at least once, and then cried in frustration when it refused to print.

Today, my husband has finally quit telling me that if my computer isn't doing what I tell it to, it's my fault.  He has witnessed countless occasions when my computer did whatever it wanted, without any consideration for my feelings on the matter.  For example, randomly reformatting my document right in the middle of a page and then refusing to re-reformat for me, forcing me to reload the program and start again.  My laptops quit working every year or so, and its not because I click on phishing emails or download viruses (I know better thanks to my resident network security geek), and my phone dials random people I haven't talked to in years from my purse.

We lived in Germany for a few years in the 90's and we got around the old fashioned way - with maps.  I have a great sense of direction and am very good with maps (maybe due to that fact that I grew up with a dad who was a land surveyor and civil engineer), and I always rode in the passenger seat as the navigator.  We got along just fine.  Fast forward to 2005, when we again lived in Germany.  My husband insisted on buying a $400 GPS that would do my job, which I was willing to do for free, but I just couldn't compete with all her buttons and sexy British accent.  I named her "Leah" and called her his "ugly wife,"  Maybe it was my attitude, but for some reason Leah hated me.  When I would touch the power button, she made this growling noise, but only for me.  She never did it to anyone else.  More than once her directions took me to a dead end or a parking lot, and once she even tried to drive me off a bridge. I'm pretty sure she tried to kill me more than once.  Many times she got us lost and then I would have to get out the map and try and figure out where we were and where we were going and get us there the old fashioned way.

Even now, I prefer to look things up on a map before I go in case the GPS screws up and takes me to the wrong place, which happens more often than it should, and I always write things down on paper, in case the computer "loses" it.  And although I have to admit to using the internet to look up the map, I have to wonder, are we really better off?