My computer mail program has been acting up for the last three days, which means I haven’t been able to send or receive email. Since I’m never going to give up email and turn into a Luddite, my latest computer malfunction has unhinged me. What has made me the craziest is watching that annoying little ball endlessly spinning, spinning, spinning next to my gmail mailbox, signaling that all’s not right in MacMail Land. I tried to fix it on my own, but failed each and every time. This meant that I had no choice but to call and try to understand those dreaded voices at…dah dah dum dum…tech support.
I realize there are far more upsetting things going on in the world right now that trump my blip-on-the-radar email glitch, but my blip is what I’ve chosen to obsess about today. Why? Because as long as I stay focused on it I can stop myself from thinking about all the other upsetting things that are going on in my life. Fair trade, wouldn’t you agree?
This morning I sacrificed my abs and gluts, as well as my inner peace, and instead parked myself on my tushie, the portable phone jammed up against my deaf ears. For over three hours. I talked, talked, talked to a variety of tech support people from all over the globe. One tried to fix the problem, but he gave up and handed me off to a different one. That one couldn’t fix things, so she transferred me to another one. That didn’t work, so I ended up calling back the first number. Then I got cut off and had to call again. By the time I was done, I’d talked to more than five different people.
Because I never crossed the same person twice, I had to calm myself down over and over in order to rationally re-articulate what my problem was. My brain kept threatening to seize up and short-circuit, but I forced it to keep it spinning like my defective Mac icon.
Why does talking with tech support turn me into such a crazy wackadoodle? Is it because I have to work so hard to interpret what the various and sundry techies are saying? Is it because I have to make multiple phone calls to solve each problem? Is because having to interact with faceless support people makes me shake with pure and utter fear that I’m never going to get no satisfaction? Is it because their fix-it solutions sometimes crash my computer and I’m convinced it’ll never work again? Is it because merely talking about my blips makes me hold my breath and forget to breathe?
I wish there was a computer Mommy out there who’d rush to my side, wrap me in her expertise, and offer more than a tech supported carrot-on-a-stick Mac-band aid fix. Or a computer wizard best friend who’d intuitively know all the right buttons to push, the right cache files to trash, the right something-or-other to tweak to get me up and running in no time.
Oh, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds! (I’ve been asked to stop cursing, now that I’m a grandmother.)
No comments:
Post a Comment