We’re Internet-less. Send. Help. Now.

We've been having problems with our computers at home in that we can't keep the Internet connected. Every time we shut the computer down and then restart it the next time, it doesn’t automatically connect.

Earlier in the week we tried turning everything off and back on and it would reconnect again. But I got really tired of running up and down stairs shutting things off and on – only to find we were still not connected. So I haven’t even tried for the past few nights.

Vince hasn't had a lot of spare time lately to identify the actual problem and figure out a solution. As for me, well, other than jiggling wires and shutting things off and back on, I'm pretty stumped.

So I figure the best way to fix this problem is to just move. When we get to a new place, professionals will have to get us reconnected to the Internet and I bet it would work. If it doesn’t, they will tell us which specific pieces/part is on the fritz and then we can go out and replace that specific pieces/part. Problem solved.

However, the mere thought of all the effort involved in packing and moving and unpacking and resettling causes me to dismiss that solution right quick.

Thus, we remain “Internet-less.”

Sigh. I am so NOT technologically savvy. Heck, half the time I forget to jiggle the wires or turn things off and on before yelling for help.

The problem is that our computers have too many pieces/parts, so it’s not easy to determine the problem. Like we have a cable wire connected to a little cable box (belonging to the cable company) in our bedroom. And, attached to that is a black box thingie that may or may not be a router. (I am not sure about the technical terms – or about what they do. Extrapolate.) And we have two wireless pieces of plastic that plug into the backs of our computers that allow my computer to work in the spare bedroom and Vince’s computer to work in the living room downstairs without having wires and cables and really L-O-N-G extension cords running up and down the stairs and all over the place.

Now I’m not completely lacking in brain cells, so I figure the culprit is most likely one of the two black boxes in the bedroom because they have little green lights on them – and some of them are flashing. One or two of them might not even be lit, for all I know.

Probably I should have paid attention to those two little black boxes back when everything was working because maybe then I’d know if all the little green lights were supposed to remain lit or if some were allowed to flash. . Hmmmm. Maybe I am missing a brain cell or two. Specifically the ones that deal with technology. Oh, and also the ones needed for following roadmaps. But that’s another subject.

I love computers. Until they don’t work – and then I hate them.

Thank goodness I have a smart phone, which is currently working because I can access my email and Facebook and such. I don’t like when emails start piling up and my phone tells me I have more than 25 new emails to wade through. What can I say? I’m a Virgo.

Vince, on the other hand, is definitely not a Virgo. Right now he has something like 7,000+ emails he hasn’t even read. If I had 7,000+ emails I hadn’t read, my head would explode.

Now, true, most of them are jokes, junk and sales fliers with long-expired discounts, but still. Those are the first emails I delete. Well, except for the jokes. I read those first. Right after the personal emails that people send me to give me the latest scoop on their lives. Which is really another joke – because I hardly ever get personal emails from people anymore.

I think I’m supposed to guess that when someone forwards a joke to me they’re thinking about me.

Wow…It’s a darn good thing it’s Friday. I sound grumpy even to myself. Probably it’s because I’m tired. My eyes don’t seem to want to focus. And I bit my tongue last night and it hurts. (Don’t ask me how I did that – apparently I couldn’t tell the difference between a crouton and my own body part…)

Oh, and if I hadn’t stressed this enough: OUR INTERNET AT HOME ISN’T WORKING!

Maybe I should casually mention to Vince that we’re paying something like thirty bucks a month for an Internet connection – and we’ve wasted about $7.50 this week. Vince does not like wasting money. Bet that would spur him on to figure out the problem, since clearly I haven’t managed to.

Oh well. Being Internet-less has been rather like flashing back to the days before we had computers. I actually cooked dinner the other night instead of grabbing something easy and then doing the Peeping Thomasina thing on Facebook to see what everyone is up to (seein’ as how nobody sends me personal email updates anymore).

And I spent last evening reading an actual real book with pages instead of trolling online for celebrity gossip or searching for the latest bestseller to download onto my iPad. Sure, I tried “swiping” to the next page, but I only did that a couple times before I got the hang of turning actual pages again.

So maybe it’s not so bad being Internet-less for a little while.

On the other hand, it has been a whole week. Time’s up.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes…

I love reconnecting on Facebook with friends from long ago and former coworkers at companies none of us still work for and classmates I haven’t seen since our 5-year class reunion, which (trust me), was a long time ago.

And I love how much easier it is to keep up with family than it used to be in the Olden Days, when you composed actual letters by hand and sent them through the actual post office to share your news. Or when you had to actually pick up the telephone, which was probably connected to the wall and had a curly cord attached to the receiver, to find out how Aunt Myrtle’s hip was healing or if Cousin Bubba was out of the slammer yet.

But sometimes I fear that Facebook is taking over my life.

And I’m not the only one, either. Just take a look at all the panicked comments whenever the powers that be at Facebook tweak the site or – as they did this past week – do a whole lot more than mere tweaking.

Multitudes of users start posting wild rumors about how Facebook is going to start charging exorbitant monthly fees to use the site. And people threaten to close their accounts if the site doesn’t immediately change it back to the previous version, which, incidentally, people complained about back when those changes occurred.

However, shortly after they make this declaration, they post comments and jokes and photos as if they’d never threatened to close their account in the first place.

This tells me that (a) people are big fat liars, and (b) we really, really, REALLY hate change.

I, too, have a hard time accepting change – even though I made a vow to myself when I was 20 that I would embrace change as it occurred throughout my life. Yeah, evidently I’m a big fat liar sometimes, too.

So what was my big “Aha!” moment I had at 20 (even though we didn’t call it that in pre-Oprah days)?

Well, settle down children and let me tell you a story.

It all began a long, long time ago when, as an impressionable youngster at the tender age of 13, I learned how to use a manual typewriter. The reason for the development of this particular talent was because my dad, an engineer, wrote ten metallurgical and chemical abstracts every month for publication and he wanted me to type them for him. He coerced me by paying me a dollar per abstract. Believe me, to a 13-year-old back in those days, $10 a month was major coin.

So I had an incentive to learn how to type. Even if it was on a stupid manual typewriter.

But, if you’ve never seen a metallurgical or chemical abstract, let me just tell you – they look rather like hieroglyphics. They contain elaborate equations, so I had to twist and turn the paper on the roller on the typewriter to get all the subscript and superscript characters in the right place. I’m sure they made sense to someone, but to me it looked like my dad had taken a bunch of numbers and characters and threw them at the page. Wherever they landed – even if was on top of another character – they stuck.

Also in these abstracts were strange words I’d never heard before like "decarburization," which means: “Loss of carbon from the surface of a ferrous alloy as a result of heating in a medium, usually oxygen, that reacts with carbon.”

Yeah, scintillating – right? Especially to a 13-year-old. So I learned to type those abstracts as quickly as possible so I could move on to more interesting stuff – like Tiger Beat magazine that had pictures of my teen idols, Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson. (Hey, gimme a break – I was 13, for pity's sake!)

Fast-forward to my junior year as a college student at Ohio State... (And, no, smarty-pants, I was not still reading Tiger Beat and I did not still have a crush on either Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson.)

Anyway, having spent my sophomore year working in the food commons area in our dorm was enough to teach me that I never wanted another job in the food service industry.

But I still needed to earn beer-drinking money, so I took a part-time job in the Metallurgical Engineering department. This was back in those prehistoric days before cell phones and laptops and any sort of instant communication. Sadly, it was even before copy machines were commonplace in offices as I recall printing student exams out on a mimeograph machine. I left my office job many a day to attend class with purple-stained fingers.

The full-timers who worked in the office were just learning how to use their new computers, which were slowly being purchased for office use throughout campus. These bulky machines took up nearly three-fourths of the space on their desks and looked extremely slow and cumbersome to me.

As “student help” I was hired to do whatever scut work the full-timers didn’t want to do, but that was okay with me. It wasn’t, after all, my career choice or anything. They got me to run from one floor to another delivering paperwork and messages and whatnot. And I also typed a lot of the midterm and final exams for the professors.

Naturally, these exams included a lot of elaborate equations. But all those years of typing abstracts for my dad had turned me into a pro and I could type at a rate of 95+ words a minute. So I could whip through those hieroglyphics like nobody’s business. Sure, I still couldn’t understand them, but that didn’t matter as I was also not interested in metallurgical engineering as a career path.

So there I sat in front of an electric typewriter, insisting that I could type the same thing on the typewriter that the office manager, Cecily, could do on the computer – and I could do it faster.

(Now you see where the “Aha!” moment is coming, don’t you?!)

So we had “races” – with me typing on the typewriter and Cecily working on the computer. The first couple times we timed ourselves, I did beat her, but that’s only because she wasn’t used to the commands on the computer and had to keep stopping to look up the codes to create a superscript or a subscript character. But all too soon, she was beating my time by a remarkable margin and I had to admit that this newfangled computer thing had merit.

And the first time she finished a page and printed it out while I was still only halfway through, I had to concede. It was in that moment that I told myself that I would never again resist change.

Then, of course, I went on to prove myself a big fat liar, so I’m not sure what the lesson is here. Except that whenever I’m faced with something completely new and different and my first reaction is to resist the change, I really do try to remember how I felt when I realized that something new could work better and faster than the old way.

I wish I could tell you that I took to the computer like a fish to water, but it did take me a little while to catch on. Like, for instance, whenever I needed to enter a superscript character, I’d invariably reach up to the side of the monitor as if to turn the roller on a typewriter. And then I’d sneak a look around to see if anyone had noticed. (And, no, smarty-pants, I never once tried to take a bottle of white-out to the computer screen to correct an error!)

And I’ve learned to love every stinkin’ computer upgrade and program refinement we’ve had over the years.

So to all you Facebook friends who are frustrated with the changes, just give it time – okay? There might even be good reasons for those changes.

Or maybe they’re just messing with us.

Just Call Me "Flash Fingers"

Have you ever borrowed someone’s computer and were shocked and appalled by how slowly it, well, computed? And you’ve thought, Oh, I’d SO be throwin’ this computer out the window if I had to work on it longer than five minutes!

Well, maybe you didn’t have that exact phrase running through your head since it’s grammatically incorrect, but if you have used a slow computer before, you know what I mean.

Anyway, welcome to my world.

For the past few months, my computer at work has been running on DOS, which does not stand for Disk Operating System. No, in my world, DOS stands for Decrepit Operating System.

I’m used to zipping around from Word documents to Excel spreadsheets and from Quickbooks to my various e-mail programs. I do this all day long. And I’m fast. Call me “Flash Fingers” if you’d like. Yeah, I’m that quick.

Except that lately, I’d have enough time to file my nails, take an excessive number of potty breaks and read an entire James Patterson novel in between the time I clicked to open a program and the time it actually opened.

Believe me, I’ve tried all the usual. Deleting unused files and programs. Running the File Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter programs. (Those took forever to work, but still didn’t make anything run faster.)

So I resorted to complaining about my slow computer. Loudly. When I was asked what was wrong with it, I’d shrug and say, “I don’t know, but it’s not workin’ right.” Hey, I did not get my degree in computers. I press the “on” button and if that doesn’t work, I’m pretty much stumped.

That’s what we have people who DID get their degree in computers for.

Fortunately, my boss was standing in my office yesterday when my computer froze. He wanted me to open a program so we could work on a project together, and I couldn’t do anything but stare helplessly at my computer and wait until that infernal hourglass timer stopped flipping. (Yeah, that’s how old my computer is. Nowadays, don’t they have a colorful little circle that spins while your computer does its thing? Or has even that been replaced by something newer?)

But the point is, our computer expert (aka our graphics guy) was instructed to get me a new computer. Immediately.

Yahoo.

I have yet to work on the new computer, however, because he cannot get the old computer to transfer the files to the new computer. It keeps crashing. So we wasted two hours this morning waiting for something to happen. When it didn’t, he got me back on my old decrepit computer and I limped along making do. It was better, I suppose, than filing my nails and taking excessive potty breaks all day long. Besides, I finished the James Patterson novel yesterday. I even offered to go home for the day, but no one took me up on my offer. Darn my luck.

Hopefully, the file transfer will be completed by the time I get to work in the morning and I can resume my “Flash Fingers” persona where I can compute faster than a speeding bullet. Hey, there is usually a cape and a mask involved and I dig being incognito while at work.

Okay, I’m being silly. Probably I’ve had so much extra time while at work watching an endlessly spinning hourglass, I’ve developed a rich fantasy life. Interesting how my mind went to capes and masks, but I don’t think I want to explore the workings of my mind much further than that.

As my friend from New York says when he wants to change the subject: “How ‘bout them Yankees?”

So, anyway, I’m happy that I have a new computer. And I’ll be even happier when it is actually up and running.

I’ll miss taking excessive potty breaks, and the novel reading opportunities. And I suspect my nails will be a mess. But I’m lookin’ forward to donning that Flash Fingers cape and mask again.

Oh, The Joys of Electronic Tax Filing

I hate my computer. I mean, seriously hate, hate, HATE my computer. Well, okay, so sometimes I love it. I love the ease of sending information to other people. I love being instantly connected to forms, data, information, programs, customers, e-mails, friends, family, Facebook…well, you get the drift.

But when my computer doesn’t cooperate or work properly? Yep, HATE it.

I decided to file my taxes electronically, despite last year’s fiasco when I couldn’t get stuff to work and ended up mailing the form in like all those other folks clinging to outdated 20th century modes of communication.

This year I was determined to get it to work.

So I gathered the booklet and forms and calculator and gamely started filling out the paperwork. Hey, what can I tell you? I am only inching along to 21st century practices. Mostly because I didn’t want any surprises like finding out I owed the IRS money!

Anyway, I filled out the paperwork and, once I assured myself that I was, indeed, due a refund, I accessed the IRS website for the online forms.

My first hurdle was creating a user name and password. This is apparently not as easy as it sounds. The system did not like the password I selected, even though I used the appropriate number of letters, numerals and special characters, as required. In desperation, I made up another password and – voila! – it was accepted. Oh, the heady feeling of success!

But then I hit a snag. And this was the beginning of my newfound hatred of my computer. Apparently, some software was outdated and I needed to update it before I could continue. So I did. It took freakin’ For. Ev. Er. And then I had to log out of all my other software programs so the computer could restart.

Finally (after playing countless rounds of “Angry Birds” on my cell phone), my computer cooperated and I was able to file my taxes online. Once sent, however, I received an automated message telling me that it would take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to learn if the IRS accepted my filing.

Fortunately, my tax return must have been in order because after the 24-hour deadline I did receive a “Congratulations!” message. Yippee!

My next task was to file my Ohio tax return. I figured this would be a much simpler process because I’d already mastered the federal tax website. Ha! Little did I know…

Once again I hauled out my trusty calculator and did the figuring on paper and then accessed the official State of Ohio website. And, once again, I was snottily informed that I didn’t have the latest version of some piece of free software and had to upgrade it.

Which I did.

Several times.

And had to restart my computer.

Several times.

And every time I went back to the screen to access the form, it told me the same thing – that I hadn’t updated my software. Grrrrr.

I don’t know this for certain, but I’d say there is an IT geek sitting in some dark corner of the Ohio Department of Taxation building who is sniggering to himself because he wrote this glitch into the program and he knows he’s creating angst in all sorts of people like me.

So I spent a moment colorfully cursing out this imagined IT geek. It didn’t solve my problem, but it did make me feel a little better.

Then I took a deep breath and decided to try one of the other online options, just to see what sort of torture I could put myself through. Shockingly, I was successful this time and was able to file my taxes electronically.

Yay!

Now, let’s just hope that I wasn’t so flummoxed and cross-eyed by the time I entered my checking account information, that I didn’t reverse a couple digits and some stranger ends up with my money. I mean, after all this hassle, I totally DESERVE that measly little refund!

Computer Hell

I’ve spent the past several days at work digging out of computer hell. And, no, it has not been pretty. Frankly, I’m so disillusioned by the whole technology thing that I’m considering chucking the ol’ PC out the window and going back to paper and pen...

…except that I’ve discovered that I now totally suck at writing with actual paper and pen. When did that happen? I used to think I had fairly decent handwriting.

The clues have been there for a while, though. Like when I address the ever-diminishing numbers of greeting cards that I send through snail mail. I don’t seem to get the whole cursive thing as easily as I once did and there is invariably an error or two. I try to fix things by going over the incorrect letter with the correct letter several times leaving a big dark blob of ink, which makes the envelope smudge.

I know I can’t be the only person having trouble writing these days. I mean, when is the last time someone wrote an actual letter? It has been years for me. Decades, even!

We have received notes written in crayon from my 7-year-old niece, but they don’t count. Well, actually, they probably should – her penmanship is far superior to mine at this point.

I had to use another computer in the office while mine was out being debugged. And my work progress was completely hindered because the file that I use to compose letters was on my hard drive. And the graphics for our letterhead was also on my hard drive. And my address list was on my hard drive.

Working on someone else’s computer that doesn’t have my “stuff” on it was quite distressing. But I took a deep breath and figured that I, an actual college graduate, could get the job done despite these hardships. So I found the addresses online. Then I grabbed a couple pieces of old-fashioned letterhead from a folder I haven’t used in about five years (seriously) and wrote the letters out by hand. Egad, I swear I had writer’s cramp after about 20 words!

Plus, there were those infernal smudges because I couldn’t seem to get the letters to flow error-free.

I’m hoping the recipients will be so shocked to receive handwritten notes that they’ll overlook the smudges. Besides, I was sending ‘em free hats and T-shirts – what more could they want?

There were other lessons in frustration for me besides just the handwriting thing. Like, for instance, it took me three times as long to complete any task. I’d begin working on something, only to realize that the e-mail address I needed was in a folder in my office. So I’d walk to the other end of the building to my office, locate the information I needed, and walk back to front of the building to my temporary office. I’d get the e-mail written (thankfully using my temporary keyboard!)…and then I’d discover that the last piece of information I needed was in yet another file folder in my office.

Grrr. I should’ve worn a pedometer because I guarantee you I walked the requisite 10,000 steps the past few days.

Nevertheless, I was beginning to catch up on the work backlog. That is, until the black ink cartridge on my borrowed printer ran dry. And, no, we are not networked, so I couldn’t send files to other machines to be printed. Naturally, we didn’t have any backup ink cartridges for that particular printer in the office.

In defeat, I stumbled back to my office, plopped down into my chair, and stared blankly at the dead computer screen sitting in the center of my desk. I can’t be sure, but it sort of felt like the wireless keyboard and mouse were mocking me.

Eventually, the computer fixer lady came back to the office with my hard drive. She had been certain that my computer had a virus on it. But it didn’t. (Which ticked me off. She had my computer ALL DAY and couldn’t find anything wrong with it??)

Sounds like the story has a happy ending – right? Well, if you guessed that you would be wrong, Skippy. My computer is running way slower than it used to. For all I know, she could’ve been so mad that she was proved wrong that she infected it on purpose.

On the other hand, it’s better than nothin’. I didn’t have to write a single handwritten note today. So – for this one day, anyway – I didn’t chuck the ol’ PC out the window.

Tomorrow, however, is another day.

T.G.I.F...or Maybe...Bon Jour?

I’m happy to report that leaving 5 minutes earlier in the morning did the trick. There was not a single infernal yellow school bus in sight! Now if I could only time my morning departure to that exact moment every single day, I’d be golden. (Yeah, good luck with that, Jane…)

Oh, but I also got to work 15 minutes early. Weird, huh? Even if I do leave at the exact same time every day, I’m sure the traffic patterns will be different and my arrival time will vary.

Oh well. At least – for today – I had absolutely no stress on my drive in to work.

Instead, I’m having computer issues. I got up an hour earlier this morning to work on my computer and everything kept freezing. I shut the annoying machine off and then turned it back on several times before it seemed to reset itself. But by then, of course, it was time to leave for work. Lovely.

And then I get to work and start to Spell Check a document – and my Spell Check is checking in French. Huh? I ask you – how did that happen? I think I would have remembered if I’d changed the language from English to French. Wonder if someone is messing with me? Or maybe this is some weird cosmic payback for that time in fourth grade when I got mad at my best friend over something stupid and I wouldn’t talk to her for three days.

So now…what? I have to carefully read every word of my document to make sure there are no spelling errors? Holy crap – this document is 65 pages long. Reading it word for word could take a long time!

On the other hand, it might be kind of fun. I could choose every word it suggests as an alternative. Monsieur Snuffleman might think his status has been elevated from plain ol’ Mister. Of course, I don’t speak French (other than a vague recollection of learning to count to 10 when I was in elementary school), so the potential dangers in switching words from English to French in a business document could be high.

Besides, the basic premise of doing a spell check is flawed whether in English or French. Why? Well, because I rarely make typos – so there’s nothing to check.

Haha.

(Okay, PLEASE don’t point out any errors you have recently found…!)

And…um…that’s all I got. My mind is sort of a blank right now. Call it an age thing. Call it a sleep-deprived thing. Call it the Friday before the long holiday weekend thing – whatever. I just want to get the party started. Hopefully our office will close before the 5 o’clock bell…

…just as long as my drive home doesn’t coincide with any of those infernal yellow school buses!

Have a great holiday weekend all!