Technology 101

The last snowstorm-related power failure shot a gun at the temple of our antique desktop computer. When the lights came back on, the system did not. Key funeral music here, please.

It didn’t bother me much. The thing had been panting for such a long while that I backed up all my files and moved over the laptop ages ago. I positioned myself at a table at the front of the house and ignored the dinosaur wheezing in the family room behind me--other than to suggest once in a while, that perhaps the music aficionados in my family might want to back up the large file of downloaded songs that lived on the desktop hard drive. Whoops. When, after the fact, they reminded me that I had an I-tunes play list too, I muttered, “Oh well.”

Then, the three of us started pulling the chair out from under each other in our quest to get to the laptop, the only remaining computer in the house. That’s all it took for my husband and I to discover a hidden cash reserve and purchase a new system, which was installed yesterday.

We are not tech savvy. We paid extra for a Geek Squad guy to show up at our house, network the thing and make it go. And it does. Off he went though, before we discovered we have no volume on the new computer. Yes, we’ve clicked all the doohinkgies. And while we were able to have a professional recover the songs we lost from the old system to an external hard drive, we are not having much luck downloading them.

God I feel clueless.  Has technology progressed so fast that the people we pay to bail us out from these minor inconveniences figure they’ve done all they need to, because they can’t fathom how hopeless our understanding of the equipment actually is?

You don’t have to respond to that. I already know the answer.