Earlier this month, I wrote up a post with my goals on it for the next 30 days in a forum I frequent and I literally wrote as one of my goals “To not die.” Seriously. The past, oh, year has been particularly rough, not just because of the pandemic, but because of severe sleep deprivation. Things just aren’t going well in dreamland, and I have been feeling like crap — and my overall functioning hasn’t been 100%. Obvi.
But to add insult to injury, technology has, once again, given me the finger. My phone, which is a fairly new iPhone 12 Mini, began inexplicably not returning to my home network after I was out and about. We ended up running through a whopping 75% of our data plan and got a text about it — gee, thanks AT&T — and finally I figured out the problem. Because I was the culprit, and we’d had a power outage recently, and yes, I had been checking my email (for business purposes!), but not that much. Sheesh. So I figured out that after coming home from the vet and finding myself still on cellular and not on Wi-Fi. Many hours later. Ugh. An update fixed that. But not after struggling with it for weeks. Then my battery started draining extremely quickly. I mean, lightning fast. That’s still kind of happening? A bit. It’s improved after the update, but I still feel like it’s not in keeping with my usage. And my battery is fine.
Then there’s my three-year-old computer. My preciousssssssss. Lots of problems there. Oh my God, where do I start? I’m careful with it — I always have been, so viruses and stuff aren’t really an issue. I’m one of those sticklers for running scans every week and if you say your computer is slow, I’m like, “Did you run your scans? Do you run your weekly scans?” If you say “No,” I’ll be like, “That’s probably your problem. Run them now. See if you have a virus. Also, check your updates. Have you done your updates lately? What OS are you running?” And so on. So I’m on top of that shizz. So anyway, it got slow. Transferring files from my hard drive to my external became an all-day activity that convinced me that yes, for some reason, I must have had a virus, despite best efforts. It wouldn’t boot up, or it would take an hour (another virus symptom), but nothing else really that pointed to a virus. Please note that I need this computer for my business, and I need A computer for my business, so this was freaking scary. I’ve since discovered that my older computer does work pretty well as a spare, but at the time? Cue panic. So I planned on — and actually still am — buying a Mac (my first!) as an investment and to upgrade and all that jazz. As soon as I had made that lovely decision, the problems STOPPED. My computer is fine. For now.
I’m still buying the freaking Mac.
Finally, today I ran into an issue with my external drive. I’m using the spare upstairs for reasons, and I am using the external to swap files between the two computers. It’s the only real way to do it, besides emailing them. I have Dropbox but it’s being weird with Chrome, and I don’t have the time or spoons to futz with it. OneDrive works too, but I prefer an actual hard drive. So anyway, today I went to make a new folder and it threw up an error – “You can’t do this, idiot. Corrupted file or directory. Abort mission.”
WHAT. IS. THIS. MADNESS.
I Googled, and it seems to be an issue with externals. I was panicking a bit because uh, more craziness, more inconvenience (besides using two computers, lugging one upstairs and downstairs every night because our cat would destroy the power cord in seconds, working in chaos…yeah…), just more….did I mention I’m horribly sleep deprived? And grumpy a lot of the time? Yeah. My tolerance for crap is so low these days. Anyway, I was able to get it working, but damn. What a scare.
So, yeah, technology just HATES me, but I am STILL alive to hate it back, I suppose.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?