I couldn’t find my phone today. No, NOT my cell phone, my cordless house
phone. To make it worse, it wasn’t ringing.
Now, under normal circumstances my phone NOT ringing is a blessing, not something
that I would bitch about.
But, I have my caller ID so that it pops up on my television
screen. That way IF a number pops up
(complete with name of course) and it’s someone I would rather NOT talk to, I
don’t even bother trying to find the phone (which BTW is USUALLY on the charger
where it belongs, not hiding somewhere in the house). Anyway the damn ID was popping like some
demented serial killer in an old high school during prom! To make matters really worse, several of the
calls were from people that I want to talk to.
So, I found the phone and TRIED to return one of the calls
only to find that my phone wasn’t working!!
No dial tone!! WTF??
Anyway, I proceeded to attach my headphone/microphone to my
computer and return a call using Google talk.
After leaving a message telling them that it was me calling and not some
strange person in California, I tried calling them back. They STILL didn’t answer. To make a long story short, it seems that
some of us in the county are having phone problems.
I’m sure that some of you reading this are aware of what
kind of month it has been here in Wild, Wonderful West Virginia. For those of you that aren’t, here is a brief
recap:
We experienced a storm from hell that wiped out power in
almost the entire state. Over 680,000
customers were without power, many of us for weeks. I didn’t have power for 2 weeks, and when it
came on it only stayed on for about a day and a half. Since then it’s been a crap shoot as to
whether or not there is power when I wake up.
Phone service has been spotty at best, insanely, horribly nonexistent at
worse. Internet comes and goes. It’s a big fat pain in the ass.
During the electrical outage the average temp was around 100
degrees for the first week, and the second week was rife with thunderstorms and
temps in the 90’s. Fun, fun……
Anyway, NOW we’re under a severe thunderstorm warning with a
flash flood warning. The storm that tore
through Illinois and left thousands without power/phone in Chicago is heading
our way with a vengeance.
All I can say is HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!
Now in case you missed it, I wrote a blog about things to do
in West Virginia in the Summer without electric…..the thing you will do the
most is SWEAT!! With the humidity staying
between 85 and 100% you have no choice but to SWEAT. I’ll let you in on a secret, SWEATING MAKES
ME ANGRY, especially when the most work I’m doing is breathing!! I HATE to sweat when I’m not doing anything
other than breathing!!
*back on topic girl, back on topic*
So, where was I, oh yeah….the phone!!
So once I found the phone and took care of making my calls,
I decided to listen to some music while I did some housework. Usually this is a smooth operation involving
turning on the stereo, finding my playlist on my laptop, plug in my wireless
transmitter and hit play. Sounds
relatively easy, right? Oh NO, NOT
TODAY!
Today the laptop decided to have a major identity crisis and
REFUSE to acknowledge the fact that some of my favorite music EVER resides on
my playlist!! Today it decided to tell
me that those particular mp3s were NOT THERE!!
So, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I went through my tricks hoping for a
reward. Checked the music folder for the
songs…..yup, right there they are.
Checked that the player was set to play mp3s…….yup, sure is. Tried to play songs on a different player…..yup
they work. Tired on RealPlayer again……SCREW
YOU BITCH, I AIN’T PLAYING THOSE SONGS!!
Well, the easy fix would be to play them in windows media
player, right?? NO, windows media player
sucks!! So I decided to play the original
cd’s on the stereo……..right up until the moment the stereo decided that it didn’t
want to play ANY cd’s today or apparently EVER again.
So here I sit, listening to the fan run and the neighbor mow
his grass. No music is gracing my ears
because I’m to the point of making sure my laptop and stereo get HAMMERED today…..and
NOT in the good, I’m drunk way!
It seems to me that while we advance in technology we are
putting ourselves at risk for insanity!
Every new product that hits the market promises “ease of use” and usually
ends up giving us a headache trying to read the manual or getting it to
work. Just as soon as we get used to one
technology another one hits the market.
Our alarms, telephones, televisions, computers, smart
phones, mp3 players, dvd players, blue ray players, refrigerators and even our
cars can all talk to us and tell us when the battery is going dead, when it’s
time to get up, when our favorite program is on, when the oil is low, when to
turn and when to defrost. Pretty soon
all of our gadgets will be able to operate themselves, our cars can already
park themselves so it won’t be long before they will be driving without any
assistance from us, it’s not that big of a step from planes flying on
auto-pilot to flying themselves.
WE may soon be the next technology to become obsolete. The
world will be filled with plastic gadgets telling stainless steel machines to
produce even more plastic gadgets!! Cars
will come and go at will and refrigerators will keep whatever the hell they
want fresh for weeks at a time. Human
beings will only be kept around to invent even more advanced gadgets to take
care of the aging gadgets that are no longer useful.
WE WILL BE LIVING A
STEPHEN KING NOVEL!!!
Before that happens I will go back to rotary phones with no
caller id, call forward, three way calling (always sounded like something that
would be really useful to a sex line business), speed dial, auto answer,
special rings, voicemail or redial on busy feature. I will dig out my old big picture tube, 13
channel, no remote, rabbit ear antenna using black and white tv. I’m sure I have an AM radio in storage
somewhere.
I will go on a technology strike!!
Except for my laptop and DSL of course. I couldn’t get rid of them. They help keep me entertained, the inform me
of the weather in some country on the other side of the world with a name I can’t
express. They allow me to post stupid
ranting on a blog that until recently no one knew existed!! THEY ALLOW ME TO
TELL MY DEVIANTS THAT I LOVE THEM. Yeah,
the laptop/DSL will be my only nod to technology. Without them I would go insane!!
Okay, you can stop shaking your head and mumbling “Go
insane?? Sounds like you already are.” Admit it, I have given a voice to the teeny,
tiny little fear of technology that flits around the edges of your mind every
time you see some new gadget that you just HAVE to have. You know I’m not insane, I’m prophetically
insightful, intelligently humorous, delightfully demented!! But NOT insane!!
I’m going to go see if I can talk my vacuum into working…….maybe
someday they’ll invent one that runs when needed without assistance from a
human……..it would be useful in helping clean up the little slivers of plastic
that seem to magically appear every time I’m angry at my cd
player/phone/ereader/tv…etc, etc, etc
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