I have no whining rights but as Derek Thompson, journalist at The Atlantic, has written, “Nothing Works“. (The syndrome.)
Whoa, what a mess. This list of tech problems has got so crazy.
First mess up, WordPress. Totally wrecked my portfolio page and hours and hours and hours with those people, cannot yet get it fixed. I need to again, again, again, search for and retrieve PDFs because some WordPress person changed them to ugly urls. In process. Found most, one left. These are not creative people, they only do tech jargon (embed, import, export, block, widget, and oh there’s more) (plus their videos, totally never answer a question) which is so unhelpful. Only can try again until the right support person comes along.
Even the sign-up “widget” for my blog shows on Firefox but not on Chrome, even after “cache-clearing.”
Thank Buddha I did not enable comments. Not enough hours in the day to manage that, nor any inclination for internet nastiness.
And more WordPress. Got to migrate some blog content from my professional site to my personal site. Count that days, not hours. That’s after, just number one, choosing theme and structuring and writing, and the WordPress media file, all the other stuff, that works for the personal site (not published yet, thank Buddha, the world won’t see it until it’s ready…not “under construction” weirdness). Different from the professional site, concept of that distinction which I’ve kind of got some, just some, of the support people at WordPress to understand, but barely. They are not creative people.
Gosh may have to move my sites to another platform, no mas WordPress. Don’t know what kind of time and effort that could involve. Sigh.
One Drive. I don’t want to save my laptop files to One Drive and now I need to spend hours and hours and hours trying to make sure I can keep the files on my laptop while taking them off One Drive. I never even signed up for One Drive. It just clutched my local files. Mess.
Open tabs. I don’t have a lot of them, know people with way many more. But to shut down my laptop and clear the cache, there’s this whole process of downloading or putting into Zotero (which actually works). But hours and hours and hours.
Browsers not working right. Constant switching back and forth.
Libre Docs keeps using not my chosen font but its default font, which I do not want. That’s a little tedious when starting new documents, but not a mess, just annoying.
Got to organize passwords again. Spreadsheets and scribbled notes need to be current. Doable, just time.
My external hard drive (which contents go back to about 1993) is now not connecting to my laptop. “Not recognized”. It always had done, now what’s failed? I’ll need someone to help with that recovery.
Folders and files on my laptop, even my email, once were really organized. Some still are, but some, I’ve just been doing deletions this morning. It seems the ones that should not be on my laptop came from the now problematic external hard drive. Will be at it all day, but probably longer.
I need to fix the overstuffed inbox, tedious but doable.
Then back to another try with WordPress.
My wireless cursor has a mind of its own, magnifying my laptop to like, crazy 400%. Think I’ve figured out the fix to that. (Like do not let the cat saunter across the keyboard.)
I live in a nice apartment building, with an office center for residents. But they only do Mac, Apple, whatever, which I find incredibly frustrating. I don’t do Apple, Mac, iPhone, that stuff. Google and the Androids are necessary evils but they work.
There are way more important problems (housing, hunger, healthcare, childcare, voting rights, reproductive rights, OMG climate, just to start) for too many people in the world. So I have privilged people’s problems and know it.
But (growl) what a workload this tech world has imposed.
Meanwhile I’m supposed to be writing (about peoples’ economic understanding/experience and how it’s come through from so many cultural sources) which is so worth the time and effort. But big enough slog on its own without stupid tech issues taking so much time. Not whining, I hope, just some frustration that in, my gosh, 2022, the tools to do our work, don’t work.
Dayna Finet 