My Love Affair with Technology—I Don't Belong in this Neighborhood

The Glitter Globe/S.R. Karfelt

He wooed me. 

Bigger. Better. Faster.

Oh, baby.

All along I've been surrounded by a smattering of what the tech world had to offer. I didn't gravitate toward it naturally. It fell into my lap. That would be my first laptop. It was one of those huge engineering ones. It didn't even fit into a laptop bag.

     "Try it," the engineer said. "I don't need it anymore. It can't handle what I need, but you, it's good enough for what you need."

That wasn't even true. My lowly Word documents crashed the snot out of that machine regularly. Maybe it wasn't satellite technology, but those files were big.

But it was free, and faster than a pencil and paper, so I took it.

Of course there were mobile phones, kindles, iPads, an Echo, a ROKU, GPS's, a ROOMBA, and a variety of laptops and desktops too. Because engineer. Because Christmas.

The computers were a mishmash of partially crippled machines all interconnected together like a Russian Skynet. This one goes to that printer—the one that only prints legal size black and white. That one goes to the color printer that is out of red, but use it anyway because those cartridges have gone extinct. This printer is actually a laminator. Don't send anything there, you have to do that by hand.

Keep that computer in that room on all the time or none of the machines will print.

Do taxes on this laptop. It has Excel.

That fifteen year old machine in the closet needs to stay on too. It's what keeps the entire network connected.

The blue thing up on top of the cabinets is the WiFi thing. The password for that is thirty random characters long. Try to figure out which ones are zeros and which ones are the letter O.

If you want to put a WIP (Work in Progress) on your Kindle Fire, email it to this address.

To put a document on the old Kindle make sure you increase the font to size 72. During transition it will reduce to a 10. No one knows why.

Your gmail, author email, and your email via the publisher is on your iPad. Your regular email is on your laptop. That old business account is on your phone. Your old Yahoo account for the neighbor's dog? That's on one of those old laptops in the corner.

The passwords for everything are written in shorthand, the kind that is extinct now, on little bits of paper and buried in that pile with all the cards and fan mail you've ever received. There are photographs in there too.

Digital photographs are on your phone. And the cloud. They will never get uploaded to the Snapfish APP for prints because you waited to do it until you had 17,000 photos and you seem to think you can get them all on there now. And the cloud laughed. And iTunes froze. No. iTunes shit the bed. And Dear Hubby said I TOLD YOU NOT TO USE APPLE PRODUCTS.

Because he'd rather you brought a Greek boyfriend home on your next vacation than you buy a MAC.

It's an engineer thang.

Sometimes, when you say I AM BUYING MYSELF A MAC AND EFF ALL THIS COMPUTER NETWORKED SHITE TO THE RIVER STYX AND BACK, he says the most heartless, unloving thing he's ever said.

     "Go ahead, but I won't help you troubleshoot it."

The answers to security questions aren't the real answer. The one thing I took away from the defense industry was this—you're only as strong as your weakest link. The fact that I like vanilla isn't exactly a state secret. So I make up different answers to every security question AND I DO NOT WRITE THEM DOWN. I memorize them in haiku fashion.

I shit you not.

My brain works like a giant disco ball of flashing lights. I can memorize patterns forever, just not consistently. What I mean is that I don't have access to all of the glitter globe information at all times. Sometimes I have to go get a drink of ice water. Walk around. Read something. Let March slide into April. And when the planets align properly, IT WILL ALL COME BACK.

Then and only then will I be able to log onto GoDaddy.

Those cords go to the external hard drive. That entire drawer is full of flash drives.

Back shit up.
Back shit up.
Back shit up.

Control S
Control S
Control S

The black thingy hanging on the edge of that bookshelf is a wireless connect for the cordless keyboard. It's okay if it falls down to be raped by the ROOMBA because that keyboard has needed new batteries for six months.

Just drag the wired one from desk to desk.

The twenty foot cord snaking around the chair is attached to the mouse that goes between the sitting desk and the standing desk.

That glass jar is full of international adapters so you can take all this shtuff wherever the wind blows you.


In the far corner is the ROOMBA, a self-propelled vacuum. It sneaked into my office one night when a power outage caused it to mix up a.m. and p.m., so I didn't shut the door. From my bed I heard it in the middle of the night, knocking up against the wall, humping table legs, and flinging all the receipts I'd sorted and left on the floor.

Dear IRS,My taxes will be late this year because the ROOMBA mixed my tax receipts with sixty years worth of my in-laws photographs I'd sorted. MIL has dementia and somehow this task has fallen to me. When I say mixed, I meant it shredded them and whipped them all over my house. I refuse to make sense of it. Please put me in debtors (AKA didn't file) prison if there is WiFi and a working printer there.Please.PLEEEEEEZE.

By the time I realized what was going on it was too late. Plus I was too tired to do anything about it. I just laid there and fantasized about flinging that ROOMBA like a frisbee in the morning. It wasn't necessary. It choked to death on that twenty foot mouse cord.

Not death death. Just Disney death.


Inside the office closet are manuals that I paid actual money for, for all my versions of MSWord and various archaic Windows manuals. Mostly I just figure if I can't figure it out by staring, it's not meant to be part of my life. That's how I choose which microwave to purchase and washing machine also.

Don't knock it. With all the time I saved not reading manuals I have figured out how miles work on at least two defunct airlines.

Plus YOUTUBE will tell me all the secrets of the universe. And kittens,

Those noise cancelling headphones don't have a cord anymore. That wasn't the ROOMBA. That was me the first time I used them on the airplane and stood up to go to the ladies room. Yeah, I forgot they were on my head and twisted that cord so hard it bent that metal bit that goes into the outlet. Yanked it clean off. Plus it whipped the cord so hard that it trimmed some hair off the guy in the seat across the aisle from me. Fortunately that was my Dear Hubby so he couldn't sue or anything. He just said, "Are those the ones I just gave you for Christmas?"

Duh, really? Do you think I go around trashing OLD STUFF? That's the ROOMBA's job.

Seriously though, is it me? Confess. It's good for the soul, not to mention a laugh or two.

And sometimes you have to laugh, or organize. Amiright?