Technology-free butter
I‘m taking part in a 30-day writing experiment. The theme for me is “personal, not pretty.” See Kale & Cigarettes for details and the Facebook Group to read stories by other 500-words-ers.
Apparently Mercury is out of retrograde now. I don’t believe in Mercury in retrograde, but I am constantly affected by it nonetheless. It doesn’t seem to care if I believe in it or not.
My life has been absolutely besot with technical problems lately. Some of them are inscrutable and some are probably rather preventable, like yesterday, when my cat rolled over on my laptop while I was on a VIP video conference with a tech client and disconnected my external monitor, abruptly ending the call. I dialed back in, sheepishly, with the cat now on my lap.
I have always considered myself a techie and actually have so many tech clients that I sometimes say I “work in tech.” Some of my major copywriting clients right now include Google, Eventbrite, and Skyword. I love tech clients because they are generally excited about what they are doing, think it is going to change the world, and never ever ever just randomly call me without an appointment.
I also love technology, in general. It’s made a big difference in my own life in so many ways, and I find it pretty exciting to be a part of a world where things like RFID wristbands exist. In case you don’t know (I just found out yesterday while writing a blog for a client), RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and it’s the electronic wristband you get at big festivals that enables you to buy stuff without cash. I wouldn’t know this from actually going to a festival, of course, but I still think it’s pretty cool. If slightly Big Brother-ish.
Yes, I love technology. But sadly, technology does not love me.
In the last one month I have had to wipe clean and then restore my 4-month-old MacBook Pro, in the process somehow inadvertently also reformatting my external hard drive where I kept the backup I needed to restore the laptop. So, lost all my data from the last 4 months, including all of the drafts I’d been working on and notes from countless phone calls with clients. And a pretty genius series of blog posts I’ll never get back.
I also had to get a new phone because my 8-month-old iPhone suddenly started spazzing out on me, and it turned out to have some crazy display issue that was covered under warranty. Second time that exact same thing has happened to me with a new-ish iPhone.
My printer isn’t really working either, and I don’t even want to talk about the garage door.
Sometimes I think it would be so swell to just Little House on the Prairie out and get rid of all of these devices. I grew up in a house without a computer, a dishwasher, a clothes dryer, or a garbage disposal. The biggest tech problem I ever had back then was that the landline cord wouldn’t quite reach the refrigerator while I was on marathon calls with my high school girlfriends about nothing.
But since my entire professional career and most of my social life revolves around technology these days. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Even if I do now own a butter churner—operated entirely by hand, thank you very much.
