For The Love of Technology

I love the portability that technology provides us with today.  I love my smart phone.  I love sitting on my couch with my laptop surfing the internet, shopping or blogging.  I love taking my laptop when I travel and being able to connect to the internet pretty much anywhere I want.  I am dependent on (some might say addicted to) this connectivity.  I feel if something is amiss when those connections are down.

Which is exactly how I feel right now.  Something crazy is going on with my internet browser.  It started a few days ago.  Late in the evening, right before bed, anytime my husband tried to open Internet Explorer (yes, I realize that in and of itself may be the source of the problem but I am incapable of downloading something else!) it immediately shut down with the error message that a problem caused the program to close.  You know the message.  Windows assures you they are looking for a solution to the problem.

I should interject at this point that I am no technology guru.  I can usually fix my modem and printer problems, run my virus software, and install and uninstall programs.  That’s about it.  So, by no means should you read this as being written by someone with any sort of technological background.  I am just your average person who wants her internet to work, dammit!

The next night, the problems started earlier in the evening.  I have no idea if the timing is at all relevant, but I do find it suspicious.  As if IE were working its way up to a complete meltdown.  I could find no connection between the browser crashing and what we had just been using the computer for.  Each time it was something different.  Yesterday I got home and started working on my two blog posts.  We had dinner, I finished writing, posted everything, and started checking out my Facebook account.  That’s when the problems really escalated, and about 2 hours earlier than the issues the previous night. 

I clicked on the link to a blog I always click on.  A separate window popped up like normal.  Then another error message popped up (I can’t recall what it said this time), but again said the browser needed to close.   Some crazy circular programming bug (I assume) kicked in and I couldn’t close anything.  I finally got both browsers to shut down and restarted the computer.  Same original error message when I opened IE.  After like five restarts, I shut the computer down in a huff and decided to leave it alone for the night.  I could survive those few hours until I got to work, right (as my hands began to shake…)?

I got home tonight and the same thing happened.  Then the panic really started to set in.  I committed to posting every day in 2011 to not one, but two, blogs!  What was I going to do?  It’s only January 6!  I don’t want to fail already.  As I write this (in a Word document) I am running my virus software to see if that finds anything.  Then, disk defragmenter.  Why?  Because I don’t know what else to do!  If that doesn’t work, throw a tantrum because I didn’t get to post today.  OK, that might not be the next step.  I think the old laptop still connects to the internet…

As I was driving home tonight I was thinking about all the wonderful advances in technology, and all the opportunities the internet holds (such as allowing someone like me to use WordPress.com to have two free blogs to promote my separate passions).  I was thinking about how I can recall a time when there was no such thing as the internet as we now know it, and a computer in the home was unheard of.  Are we too dependent on technology?  Maybe.  But I wouldn’t change it for the world (even though I sit here cursing my computer).

*UPDATE: I am posting this, so I obviously got the computer to work.  I had to disable all internet add-ons, and that seems to have done the trick so far.  I think shopping for a new laptop has been added to the weekend’s agenda.