If you find this message, please let my family know I am alive and well. As I write this it is day #5 without an internet connection thanks to an electrical storm and resulting fried circuits. A parade of technicians has come on a mission of repair, each failing and passing the project on to the next in line. With each passing, futile day my despair increases.
Gather around, children, and I will tell you about communication in the olden days. You had a cylindrical object, a tube with a point at one end and filled with dark liquid. You held this in your hand with the point on a sheet of paper and moved your hand around to make marks on it. You then folded the paper, put it in an envelope with an address consisting of the recipient’s name, house number and street, and city on it and put it in a box. A person came and collected it along with all the other envelopes and took them to a depot where they were sorted and placed in some sort of conveyance – truck, boat and/or plane – that transported them to the depot in the destination city. Another person then took the envelope to the house of the person marked on it. It was a cumbersome process that took days.
It’s hard to believe that people actually communicated that way. It required no electricity, no connectivity and pretty much no smiley faces. Just lots of manual labor. And since the process was so laborious, you tended to write about the big stuff, no two-line updates about the dog playing Frisbee on the lawn. Difficult to imagine in a Twittering world.
I’m struggling hard to cope with my new-found isolation, disconnected from family, friends and weather reports. As I gulp the last few swallows of wine to empty the bottle that will carry this message, I think back to the days when penmanship had meaning. It’s nothing I want to return to. I like letting my fingers do the talking. But for the moment, my existence feels pre-industrial. I guess that means it’s time to hike to the sea and get this puppy on its way.
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Snapshots Not a Snap
As you can probably see, I have at long last bought a camera. I’ve taken a first few pictures of my house so I can show my dear ones in the States how I’m living, in the process adorning this page with a picture of my back door.
It’s a simple, little camera of the point-and-shoot variety (a Canon A1100) and not at all expensive. It takes lovely pictures to my untrained eye. But whenever I buy anything I feel slightly sick afterward. The more expensive it was, the sicker I feel. I suspect my husband of blessed memory had some nefarious operant conditioning performed on me while I slept because otherwise I can’t explain this. I used to love to shop.
But that is nothing compared to the sheer terror that awaits when you get the camera home and open the box. Then you have to contend with finding where the batteries go, how to open the place where they go, insert the memory card and figure out what all those little buttons with the unintelligible symbols instead of actual words do. And heaven help you if you press the wrong one. At least the instructions were mercifully in blessed English. Of course, in the olden days you just had to know how to load the film.
Oddly enough, the hardest part was transferring the pictures to the computer. I say “oddly” because I work with computers all day long and I’m not afraid of them and I’m not mystified by them. I actually like them. But try as I might I could not get the computer to recognize the camera. Two phone calls to the service department of the camera store were not much help. Then in desperation I rang my friend, Drora, who’s a wiz with all things technical. “Use the USB port at the back of the computer instead of the front,” was her advice. Presto, it worked like a charm.
I plan to illustrate these pages with my photos in the fullness of time. For the present, I’m still a little shaken and suffering from technoshock. It will pass. I will learn how to use all this stuff. But my question for the universe is this: why is nothing ever easy?
It’s a simple, little camera of the point-and-shoot variety (a Canon A1100) and not at all expensive. It takes lovely pictures to my untrained eye. But whenever I buy anything I feel slightly sick afterward. The more expensive it was, the sicker I feel. I suspect my husband of blessed memory had some nefarious operant conditioning performed on me while I slept because otherwise I can’t explain this. I used to love to shop.
But that is nothing compared to the sheer terror that awaits when you get the camera home and open the box. Then you have to contend with finding where the batteries go, how to open the place where they go, insert the memory card and figure out what all those little buttons with the unintelligible symbols instead of actual words do. And heaven help you if you press the wrong one. At least the instructions were mercifully in blessed English. Of course, in the olden days you just had to know how to load the film.
Oddly enough, the hardest part was transferring the pictures to the computer. I say “oddly” because I work with computers all day long and I’m not afraid of them and I’m not mystified by them. I actually like them. But try as I might I could not get the computer to recognize the camera. Two phone calls to the service department of the camera store were not much help. Then in desperation I rang my friend, Drora, who’s a wiz with all things technical. “Use the USB port at the back of the computer instead of the front,” was her advice. Presto, it worked like a charm.
I plan to illustrate these pages with my photos in the fullness of time. For the present, I’m still a little shaken and suffering from technoshock. It will pass. I will learn how to use all this stuff. But my question for the universe is this: why is nothing ever easy?
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