Crabby Old Lady's Computer Complaints

[EDITORIAL NOTE: There an elderbloggers story by Candice Novak today at U.S. News and World Report about financial aspects of retirement that quotes me and Chuck Nyren of Advertising to Baby Boomers. Nice to see "Elderbloggers" in the headline.]

Crabby Old Lady has long been of the opinion that the minor irritations of life are more stressful than big problems which, in their tendency toward life-stopping disruption, usually get immediate attention.

Small difficulties, however, are often ignored until, in the accumulation of their numbers and repetition, turn every day into an unbroken series of time-sucking annoyances. Crabby’s list has now reached the level of hair-tearing, which her thinning follicles can little tolerate. Her complaints are almost exclusively computer and internet related.

Many years ago at the dawn of the personal computer era, internet executive Barry Diller, when he was still a television executive, remarked that computers would someday become useful tools, but not until they were as easy to use as a light switch.

Any non-geek with a PC knows of what Mr. Diller speaks. Crabby’s laptop, which was in perfect working order after a major crash in December required reinstallation of Windows, has gone all to hell:

• Her nifty, multi-tasking printer/copier/scanner, which she bought about four months ago when the old one gave up after five or six years of devoted service, refuses to print, although its other functions are fine.
• Her email program, which for years has worked as she asked, now suddenly shuts down at its own whim several times a day.
• Windows has stopped recognizing the CD/DVD drive meaning any repair that requires the original software cannot be made.
• MSWord, which Crabby uses for all her writing, hiccups three or four times a day and tells Crabby there is a malfunction for which it must shut down and restart.
• Page loading at Typepad, Crabby’s blog host for as long as TGB has existed, has recently and randomly slowed to snail’s pace. Typepad says they are upgrading the entire system. Not too soon for Crabby, but they've been saying that for months.
• Typepad’s email help desk, which for years responded in under 24 hours, now takes four days to get back to Crabby.
• And in five years(!), Typepad has still not provided Pro Account users with a template for the ugly comment confirmation page, although they keep saying it is in the works.
• Crabby could be wrong, but the number of websites, software programs and blogs using light text on a dark background, which is painful if not impossible for old eyes to read, seems to be growing like weeds.

Additionally, web surfing is becoming a nightmare of delays. Crabby uses a cable modem but sometimes she might as well be back on a dialup connection. Lacking the technical expertise to determine what the hangups might be, Crabby can only guess: the web itself? the increasingly bloated Firefox browser she uses? (don't get her started on the new Firefox 3.0) Or could it be her ISP?

Crabby has never been a conspiracy theorist – she figures possible conspiracies involve too many people for the secret to remain secret – but the current net neutrality confrontation between those who want to keep the web equal for all and the mega-corporations who want to charge big bucks for premium internet access leaves her wondering.

Crabby Old Lady’s ISP has, in the months corresponding to her apparent surfing slowdown, heavily promoted a new, high-speed, “business class” internet service at $10 more per month than residential broadband service. The ads are fuzzy about what a customer gains from the extra charge, but combined with the apparent slowing of Crabby’s web-surfing capability, she has entertained the idea that either businesses get faster access or the speed of residential service has been slowed to force people to pay more.

Crabby is only speculating. She doesn’t even know if this is technically possible and anyway, a great, big, national telecommunications corporation wouldn’t do anything underhanded like that, would they? Crabby, in her computer frustrations, must be having conspiracy fantasies, right?

Over the past month or two, Crabby Old Lady has spent hours - undoubtedly adding up to a few days snatched from her life - trying to fix her computer problems without much success. Although she is not a computer naïf, she is also no expert and has read more impenetrable instructions – often conflicting - than any human should be required to endure in a lifetime.

Ahhhh. There now. Crabby realizes she has now wasted your time too, but her stress level has abated a bit for having aired her complaints and she can now get back to looking for solutions while she waits – impatiently - for Barry Diller’s computer light-switch to take effect.

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Kathi W. reflects on her impending Big Six-Oh.]