This post is part of my 2022 Word Project. You can read what that’s about here.
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
8:08pm
I don’t want to blog today. I want to straight-up complain. This is the part where you roll your eyes and ask, But isn’t that what you do most days?
There isn’t an appropriate level of adjective to describe today. Annoying doesn’t even come close. Irritation is the thing you feel when a bug lands in your soda. Infuriating merely scratches the surface.
So let’s skip the poetry and get to it, shall we?
It might not surprise you to learn that the majority of today’s angst comes courtesy of technology.
I am at my absolute wits end.
Ralph and I have been making some changes to our server. For reasons too boring to explain, we are moving all the photos for all the websites from point A to point B.
The hilarious part of this is that we moved all the photos from Point B to Point A just a few months ago. And that was after we moved all the photos from Point A to Point B a year before that.
This is like my father’s home improvement projects. Put the wall up. Take the wall down. Put the lattice up. Take the lattice down. I feel like there is a family trend happening.
Moving the photos has been neither quick nor simple. We’re now officially going on week three of doing it.
But that’s not the part I want to complain about.
While moving photos this time I had occasion to notice something that I hadn’t before. Every time a photo is uploaded to a website, it makes anywhere from 20 to 30 copies of itself.
Why does it do this? Only the technology gods can tell.
Think about that for a second. This blog right now? That picture at the top? That one picture? There are 20 of those somewhere.
And that blog about the clouds that had what, ten photos? There are now 200 of them taking up space, costing me money for storage and bandwidth.
Finding that out was annoying. Because now I have a problem, because my tiny little blog all by itself has about a thousand photos. Multiply that by 20 or 30 and then multiply THAT by the cost of storing all those irrelevant photos and I’m aggravated.
So I make a plan. I am going to delete the photos that we don’t need.
Here’s how that went.
Me: :::deletes photo:::
Website: HOW DARE YOU! I will unpublish your page now!
Me: :::blinks a few times. republishes page. deletes another photo.:::
Website: I AM NOT AMUSED! I will make more random copies of this photo!
Me: :::scowls. deletes additional random photos.:::
Website: YOU WILL REGRET THIS! I will delete ALL your photos now!
Me: :::imagines unplugging the internet and going back to the Stone Age. gets photos from backups and replaces them:::
Website: STUPID HUMAN! I refuse to recognize your backup photos! How do you like your broken website now!
Me: :::slams lid on computer and does laundry:::
Then I texted a friend. A friend who had a name up until today when they suddenly started appearing in my texts as a phone number.
Why did it do this? Only the technology gods can tell.
I go into my contacts to look at their name and they are no longer in my contacts.
So I make a plan. I am going to re-sync my contacts.
Here’s how that went.
Me: :::logs into contact manager to attempt sync:::
Contact manager: HOW DARE YOU! I will delete more of your contacts!
Me: :::disconnects sync and reconnects it:::
Contact manager: I WON’T STAND FOR THIS! I will randomly duplicate some of your contacts now!
Me: :::growls. logs out of all accounts. disconnects everything. logs back in and starts over.:::
Contact manager: DIE, HUMAN! I will bring back contacts you deleted last month then delete all the birthdays you put in last week! How do you like your broken address book now!
Me: :::slams lid on computer and makes tea:::
Then I made tea. Oh, you didn’t think that went well, did you?
Instead of pouring the hot water into my teacup, I poured Ralph’s coffee into it. Please don’t even ask how that happened because it would involve brains and stupid. He didn’t get coffee and I didn’t get tea. I threw it all in the sink and gave up.
And lest you think that ended that, when I opened the refrigerator to make lunch the container of rice and beans fell out and spewed wet sticky leftovers across half the kitchen floor, because why not.
It must have been pretty clear by that point how I felt about the day because Ralph got up from doing whatever work he was doing, said I got it and cleaned it all up without another word.
I asked him if he thought AI was taking over. Or if there was an electromagnetic pulse that I didn’t know about that was wrecking havoc with our technology.
A couple of days ago I got a calendar invitation from him to walk in Holmdel Park. At first I got a chuckle. I thought he was having a brain moment like me and instead of putting Harlinsdale, which is the park by us, he put Holmdel, which is the park we used to go to when we lived there.
Then I saw the date on the invitation.
2014.
Over the course of the next hour I got pinged by calendar invitations for client meetings I had in 2016 and social events from 2015.
Why did it do this? Only the technology gods can tell.
This is far from an exhaustive list of the absurd, maddening, outrageous things that happen every day of my life. But they are the only ones I will inflict upon you today. Sometimes it really does feel like computers are possessed. And they’re here to haunt you.
I’d say something positive like tomorrow will be different or at least I figured out a solution. But it won’t be and I didn’t. So maybe I’ll attempt Tea, Take Two and hope that at least I can pour from the right bucket this time, assuming my brain has not been completely fried after another day of technology whack-a-mole.
There is some good news though. I did finally figure out how to stop the websites from making 30 copies of every photo. They only makes four now. I’m calling that a win.
Photo: exactly.