Category Archives: Technology

03.31.16
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Forty days (and forty nights) without Facebook

Forty days without Facebook...one day at a time

Forty days without Facebook…one day at a time

I have toyed with taking an extended breather from Facebook in the past, and decided this Lenten season would be the perfect opportunity for a 40-day break. Not that I am addicted to, have any particular problem with, or objection to, social media, but I sensed it would be a good discipline in making space for other things.

In my last post, Lent: Making Space for Loneliness, I wrote extensively about my extraordinary spiritual journey launched by giving up Facebook (and other social media). I don’t think it was solely the absence of social media, but rather the symbolic act of choosing to very intentionally create space, that paved the way for my rich spiritual experience. Aside from the spiritual, my break from Facebook was also an interesting anthropological self-study. Some of my lessons learned about Facebook (and other social media):

It is addictive. Although I don’t consider myself an abuser, during my first few days of cold turkey, I clearly exhibited minor symptoms of withdrawal. On Ash Wednesday, I posted a status update proclaiming I would be giving up Facebook for Lent and immediately got out of Facebook. I then fought several urges to go back and edit my status update (I of course had ideas about how I could’ve said it better) and to see if I got any likes or comments. I didn’t actually get the shakes, but I finally had to hide my iPhone in a drawer to avoid temptation.

The next day, I awoke and noticed how I reflexively checked my phone. I saw  that I had 4 notifications on the Facebook icon. It was really hard not to open the app. What if I was missing something important? What if someone posted something about me? What did people think about me not being on Facebook? Did they miss me?! I could feel the anxiety level rise. As I saw the number of notifications escalate, it felt like mild torture. I got an email telling me a new friend had sent a Facebook friend request and I spent far too long internally debating whether I should call her and explain. (What would she think of me if I ignored her for 40 days?!)  I thought about deleting the app from my phone, but when I tried, I got a warning about losing data, so I hunkered down for the long haul.

But you know what? By the end of the first week, I was perfectly fine without Facebook. I began to feel less anxious being completely off social media. It was one less thing to keep up with. It was like a high-maintenance person had left the room and I could relax.

It can be an escape. I began to notice that I often turn to Facebook and Instagram, or sometimes Twitter (which I don’t use that often), when I am bored or lonely. It can also be an incredible time suck. I can spend hours going down rabbit holes (Oh, look!  A video on Michael Jackson first doing the Moon Walk! Oh, wow! An interesting article on the train system in Italy!) when I intended only to quickly check my notifications. Not having social media as an option forced me to be creative when I needed something to do. I found myself reading more books and magazines, and paying more attention to what was happening in the real world surrounding me (rather than focusing on the virtual world). I began to wonder where I ever found time to spend on Facebook.

It is its own superficial and distorted world. I found, during my break from social media, that I was taking far less photos. I realized that when I went somewhere that might qualify as “fun” or “interesting,” I was too often thinking about getting a photo, only so I could share what I was doing or where I was on Facebook.  There is a huge temptation to “brag” about how wonderful our lives are. The first weekend of my Facebook ban, we went wine-tasting in Paso Robles, and I was dying to post pictures.   By the time we went to Spring Training baseball in Scottsdale, AZ a few weeks later, I didn’t even think about posting. Without the pressure to be constantly reporting on my activities, I found I was more present in my real world experiences and able to more fully enjoy the moments. Likewise, I discovered that constantly looking at others’ “perfect” Facebook lives can be unhealthy;  particularly when it encourages unfavorable comparisons or jealousy. It is hard to get a realistic picture of people’s lives solely through their Facebook posts.

It can be divisive.  Particularly in an election year, especially this election year, I often find the political discussion upsetting. I am all for freedom of speech, but the tone of discourse can, and does, get nasty. I grew up with my mother’s admonition that sex, religion, and politics are not topics for polite company and that is my own self-policing rule on social media. Mostly, I find the lack of respect (and common sense) in the virtual world distressing, and from that standpoint alone, the break was welcome.

There are positive aspects. I came to the conclusion that about 75% (maybe more) of the time I spend on social media is fairly useless and unrewarding – for example, scrolling through updates on people or things that are not that important or relevant to me. However, the other 25% is what I love about it. During my absence, I missed my core group of Facebook friends (scattered near and far geographically) with whom I treasure contact. I wondered how they were doing, and I missed seeing their updates and comments. I also found that, in some of my social groups (like my Book Club), we use Facebook very effectively as a form of communication and organization. At times, I felt out of the loop and had to more proactively reach out via other avenues to get information (which is not a completely terrible thing).

My new outlook. As the end of Lent approached, my husband joked that I would need to reserve the entire afternoon of Easter to catch up on Facebook. However, I felt surprisingly ambivalent about getting back to social media. Sure, I missed aspects of it, but I’d also become accustomed to the extra space without it.

On Easter Sunday, we came home from brunch, and I opened Facebook.   After an extended absence of 40 days, it took me about 20 minutes to catch up. Whereas before my break I might have gone through each of the 100+ notifications more carefully, now I simply skimmed for the things that looked important. I’ve since found that Facebook re-entry has been a tad overwhelming. After becoming accustomed to the relative calm of no social media,  I now pretty quickly reach sensory overload.  It feels like that high maintenance person has re-entered the room.

In the future, I intend to enjoy the positive aspects of social media that bring me joy, but I will strive to avoid or minimize the unhealthy parts. I also see the benefits of periodically taking breaks. I thought of Noah, who spent 40 days and 40 nights on the ark when God wanted to cleanse the world, and then waited another 40 days to open a window after it rained. The last 40 days have been a good cleansing for me; an opportunity to reassess the role social media has in my life. And now, its time to carefully re-open the window and enjoy the photos of my dear Facebook friends’ vacations and grandchildren!

 

 

10.28.15
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Breaking Up….Is Great to Do!

Last week my husband bought me a new Dell printer, making me ridiculously happy. I had no idea an inanimate object could bring me such joy. I find myself smiling at it, even singing to it, “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, “So Happy Together”, “You Light up My Life.” The Era of Good Feelings has once again come to my home-den-office.

My devotion to my new Dell is best understood by my dysfunctional, at times abusive, relationship with my ex, an HP. For over two years, since I retired and became wholly dependent on our home office equipment, I was victim to the dark moods and spiteful whims of this evil HP. It wasn’t that it didn’t print – it just didn’t print consistently.   It was always slow as molasses. But at times, it would grow inexplicably temperamental and stop functioning, usually when I was rushed or needed to print something important. Other times, it would print, but the colors would be whacky. Or, it would suddenly stop printing PDFs, or pages from the Web, or any number of other programs it would single out for punishment. Then the next day, all would be operational. It felt like it was playing me for laughs.

My husband has a higher threshold for this type of inconvenience than I do, mainly because he is responsible for fixing things and he didn’t know how to fix this thing. Since the HP did work sometimes, it never qualified as “broken” so he was not in favor of buying a new printer. And, most maddeningly, that little stinker would print just fine for his computer (which sat next to and connected to the HP). So, we resorted to increasingly irritating work-arounds, like me emailing documents to my husband to print from my his computer, turning the printer off and counting for 60 seconds and turning it back on, and (my favorite), smacking it on the side. After days of stomping back and forth between the den and the printer, turning it on and off, on and off, on and off, cussing and yelling at the HP, my husband would calmly say things like, “Hmmm, maybe I need to take it apart and fix it.” And I ‘d say, “Or maybe I need to take it apart and kill it.”.

One day I came home and my husband was doing printer brain surgery. He had hundreds of little parts spread all over the kitchen island. He had my late father’s loops (the magnifying lenses my dad used in his dentistry practice) on his head and an extra bright office light trained on the patient.   The surgery was temporarily successful, and the printer worked like a champ for a few months.

UNTIL, last spring, as I was preparing for my son’s USNA graduation week and planned to produce packets (including schedules, maps, and nametags) for all our guests. After spending countless hours designing, drafting and collecting materials on my computer, I began printing. The HP-from-Hell would print five of something, and then stop. Or one of something else, then stop. Then no more that day. It just refused, flagrant acts of insubordination. The next day, it would print three more of something and nothing of the other. There was one PDF that it never printed correctly. And all this after trying all the work-arounds – the turning on and off and emailing and smacking. I was mostly alone in the house those days and the swear words were gushing from my lips like a Roman fountain. I finally downloaded everything I couldn’t get that damn printer to print on a flash drive, drove down to Kinko’s, and had everything printed in less than 30 minutes.

In the months following the graduation, I felt myself pulling away from the HP. I was no longer willing to work on our relationship. If I encountered any resistance at all from that little nutcase, I took my flash drive and turned to Kinko’s. By the end of summer, HP and I were at an impasse. It basically wasn’t printing anything for me; meanwhile, my relationship with Kinko’s blossomed (and feeling the expense was worth every cent to my sanity).

And then a wondrous thing happened. Not having me to kick around anymore, HP started messing with my husband.   I began hearing a few swear words coming out of his mouth, and noticed that he was increasingly having problems printing. Now things were getting interesting!

In September, we decided to get a new laptop for me, so we’d each have a laptop when we’re traveling, and my husband said something incredible. At least, I thought he said, “Maybe we’ll get you a small printer to go in your office.” I tried not to get too excited, as these initiatives take time to come to fruition in our house.

Then that HP stupidly kept messing with my husband, and he began researching in earnest what might be wrong. What he discovered online was that an “update” pushed out by HP in the last few years basically destroyed some key part of the printer. That did it! Now he was angry! HP had just messed with the wrong guy. (A little slow, but glad he was now feeling my outrage.) He found a part on eBay that some claimed could be a DIY fix to the problem, which he ordered and it came last week, and then my heart sank. Now we might be in for another protracted period of “fixes” to that blasted HP.

The Good (Dell), The Bad (HP) and the Ugly (also HP)

The Good (Dell), The Bad (HP) and the Ugly (also HP)

But, last Friday I came home to a huge empty cardboard shipping box sitting on our living room floor. I went into my den/office and there it was…my new Dell. It was love at first sight.  The reign of HP oppression has ended.

Since then, I’ve been printing to my heart’s content. Color! Two-sided! PDFs! Webpages! That document from graduation that HP never printed! Everything is done quickly, cheerfully and perfectly, with no attitude. I may even be able to print my Christmas letter myself this year. It all just makes me want to sing. I love my new printer.

10.02.13
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Please Stand By…..I Am Currently Experiencing Technical Difficulties..Potentially Forever

OK, I admit, besides my friends, there are a few things I miss about the job.   In no particular order:

  • My office
  • My Administrative Assistant (who counts double since I consider him a friend)
  • IT Support

Up until I was getting close to retirement, I primarily used my work laptop to store files, my company email address for all correspondence, and my office phone number and my company BlackBerry to communicate.   We have an iMac at home for my husband that I rarely used.  At work, I had a great office, one down from the corner on the outside, with a great view of the city from the 20th floor.

I was the Queen of my technology.  I had my email organized in archives by year and subject matter. My laptop files were organized such that I could find almost anything from any client, any topic, any year, within a matter of minutes.  Just try me! I had the best Administrative Assistant in the office, and he took care of all my travel arrangements, created kick-ass PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents for me, finished tasks with minimal direction (because I’m convinced he is part gypsy mind-reader), and was always calm, kind and patient.  When I had a computer problem that Mel couldn’t handle, we had an IT department and a help desk that I could call 24/7.

In anticipation of retirement, my husband and I bought iPhones. an iPad and a Mac Book Pro laptop.  Then I started transitioning files and contacts to all our various devices.

And that’s when the trouble began.  First, I tried to download scores of personal documents onto a flash drive and then transfer them to my home laptop.  On first blush, everything looked copacetic and I marveled at how easy this transition was going to be.  A week before my last day in the office, however, on a whim I tried to actually open one of these files and got an ominous error message.   I then spent half a day furiously emailing documents from the office to home.

A few days AFTER I surrendered my company laptop, I noticed that messages in my personal email inbox (including the personal file attachments I so valiantly saved) were mysteriously disappearing after 7 days. All this occurring from my new base of operations: the den at home, with no desk, no view, with its own weather system of 85 – 90 degrees in the summer even with the A/C on and the ceiling fan that routinely blows all of my papers off the coffee table and under the futon couch causing me to constantly think I have lost my mind because I can never find anything.

 

As part of his lecture to me at the Apple Store, the Genius drew this chart because he could tell I had no clue what he was talking about

As part of his really annoying lecture to me at the Apple Store, the Genius drew this chart to illustrate his points. I just wanted to know why my emails were disappearing.

By this time, the closest thing I had to an IT helpdesk was my husband.  I approached him at what was apparently an inconvenient moment about my disappearing email problem and he suggested I leave him alone and make an appointment with the Genius at the Apple Store.  The next day I met with Sean O’Twentysomething, the Apple Genius, who really irritated me when he didn’t just push a button and fix my problem immediately but instead schooled me about IMAP and POP and the CLOUD (as if I really cared).  But not half as much as I irritated my husband when I showed him Sean’s IMAP/POP/ICLOUD  drawings and told him that Sean O’Twentysomething said I should delete all our emails and start over.  My husband muttered something about multiple devices and iCloud and how much easier it was with just him on the home computer.

A series of further technical crises ensued, including a need to determine how to print from the laptop in the den to the computer in the family room, my inability to print attachments from an email, trouble deciphering how Apple mail organizes emails by “conversation” (causing me to shriek “HELP ME….THE EMAILS ARE DISAPPEARING AGAIN!!!), and messing up both of our shared calendars. One morning, after I marched into the kitchen a third or fourth time to have a word with the IT department (my husband) who was in the middle of slicing apples, he said, “You sure are demanding.  Were you like this at work?”  And then he went back to slicing apples. My reply that I was only being about a third as demanding as I was at work and that I missed Mel who was always patient and helpful with me certainly didn’t help the situation.

In my minds eye, I saw flashbacks of my father, who retired as a Navy captain after a distinguished 30-year career.  The first thing my mom did when he retired was to assign him chores around the house.  Mainly to send a clear message as to who was in charge. The two chores I clearly remember were vacuuming the stairs and cleaning the toilets.  My father instinctively knew that he would never issue orders again.  In this moment of clarity, I too, realized that I have lost my clout in my new world order.  I’m going to just have to wait my turn with the IT department, until he’s good and ready to help me, or just get used to a life of technical difficulties…or, horrors!…..start to figure things out myself.