February 12, 2013

  • Embracing Technology

    Little known fact: if you have Comcast basic cable service and suddenly you have no sound on 2 channels, press the 'lang' key once. This works whether you perform this task intentionally or you just reckless pick up the remote, mashing levers at random. The first tech I called didn't know that, either.

    I am in charge of the cable service. There are two reasons for that. One is, I am more likely to be home where the cable service is and all cable service help requests will eventually require walking into the room where the service is delivered and (at the very least) staring intently at the misbehaving box (it usually requires moving the dresser away from the wall without spilling the TV and unplugging the service, counting slowly to ten and and plugging it back in. (The other reason is Nancy is usually too tired to problem solve in the evenings.) These are the steps that must be performed first, even if you have called for service repairs 6 times in 2.5 weeks. The actual physical technician who came a week and a half ago told us the real problem is the line, which is old, over-loaded and last year's technology--but since we still get service, the line will be replaced 'eventually'. And yes, you're right: I should have told him then that our premium channels--for which we pay extra--pixelate during dramatic minutes (or quarters of hours). I wasn't the person he shared that information with.

    There was a time when I knew how every machine in my home worked. Well. That's arrogant and needs immediate revision. I knew how every machine received and sent signals over which cords, wires and remotes. I knew that 'electricity flows like water' and could trace the power through the maze of wires on the backs of my machinery piles. My knowledge could best be summarized as: "I knew what was wrong when..." It was useful. I felt powerful.

    However, technical information changes daily, changes with every update, every new service, every replacement of previous service and/or equipment and I think the beginning of the end was the cell phone. When I was a child we had a black telephone (they were all black) with a rotary dial (actually we had wooden boxes with a little handle that rotated, an earpiece that hung in a hanger on the side and a mouthpiece mounted on the front of the box--just like June Lockhart on Lassie.) You had to listen to the pattern every time the phone rang because there were 6 people on our party line, and our calls were codes as one long ring and four shorts. If you picked up the receiver, other members of our party line might be talking on the phone. Listening in was considered rude. Now I have a little glass rectangle that rides around in my pocket and plays games, lets me access the Internet, calls me, texts me, takes pictures, reads books, tells me the weather and doubles as a flash light.

    Somewhere in between those two phones I lost interest in relearning how to use the same conceptual base every other year. I blame computers in general and Word in particular, which needs to be relearned every other year. I now know more obsolete information about Word than I know about the current version.

    It's curmudgeonly of me, I know.

    My current phone hangs up on me, tweets for no reason, and suffers from hysterical narcolepsy, and I have no idea why. I haven't really reported it to its maker because it's malfunctions may or may not have something to do with the keys on the outside of the case which I may or may not pinch while trying to pry it out of my pocket or hold it to my ear. I have no idea. It annoys me that it malfunctions, but apparently its maker said, 'hell, those people never real the manual anyway' and never printed one. Nancy's phone hangs up on her mid-conversation as well, so I have diagnosed the problem as 'systemic'. I find that as I toddle on toward obsolescence, navigating automatic answering programs is not how I choose to spend my retirement.

    I am in charge of the cable service. Did I mention that?

    I live with a 95 year-old who views life through a remote that can cause random cable malfunctions just by the way she picks it up. I know this to be true because as I was talking to the technician on my narcoleptic phone I picked up the remote as directed, flipped to the misbehaving channels and they talked to me--which they have not done for 5 days--and just as I was about to assure her the problem had magically resolved THEY STOPPED TALKING. Fortunately the technician was able to talk me down, because what I wanted to do was throw the remote through the TV set.

    Which would have involved buying a new TV, taking out the old one, wiring up the new one, finding the secret ID code to program the TV to the cable remote (shit, what did I do with that?) and calling the voicemail maze to tell someone that, yes, once again--she has no sound on channels 3 and 8 (which are physically the closest to us: the announcers could just yell a little louder, really.) 

    Yesterday I: went to writers group, went to PetSmart to schedule Annie's private lesson, picked up the dogs, came home, found the secret code to access the voicemail on Ilah's phone, identified, via a tech call, the secret code to get sound back for channels 3 and 8, turned in our extended cable services for flagrant pixelation, heated her lunch, beat her at Phase 10, took the dogs to get their nails clipped, shared my cache of new knowledge with Nancy when she came home...

    Today the technician is coming between two and four, assuming I answer all of the preceding phone calls appropriately, to re-order our pixies so they dance in proper alignment.  

    And once again the giant invisible monster is looming in the back yard. Riley has it under control. I have determined, through careful observation, that the Monster in the Back Yard is actually a game of musical chairs the prize is not overcoming the monster so much as getting back in the house and claiming the left end of the Conservatory couch. (The best end. The superior end. The Only Really Good Place to Sleep in the entire house.) Where Annie now is, coiled and sleeping, while Riley is still pacing the gate in the back yard, wondering where the hell the monster went...

    He was here just a minute ago, Annie said so.