AN APPLE A DAY

Technology.  Love it or hate it?  I mostly love it.  Although I do want it to operate like my refrigerator.... like an appliance that I take for granted and works fine without much input from me.  Cold?  Good.  Not?  Call someone to fix it.

But I find my "tech devices" want a lot more from me than just opening the door and grabbing an apple.

Speaking of Apple.... I am a devotee.   I bought the very first publicly available Apple 128 in 1984.  As a student at the University of Washington (the year I finally graduated from college at age 33 -- topic for another blog post),  I got a special student discount, but it was still amazingly expensive given that I figured I was buying a fancy typewriter.  But I was psyched.  I loved that computer.  LOVED IT!  I was involve in some local political action issues then and it was in constant use producing issue statements, press releases, meeting agendas, flyers, and meeting minutes.

At some point, though, as a computer became an everyday part of our lives, we decided we needed more "memory" and got another, more powerful Apple.   When it was time to replace that one,  we went to the dark side and started buying PCs mostly because they were more affordable.  But the constant crashes and fatal error messages and need for firewalls and virus protection software was such a pain in the behind!  Plus, even though they are the local darlings and I wanted to be loyal (I AM proud to live in Gates-land), certain glitches with Microsoft software started to be more hassle than help.

Ten years ago, back to Apple we went and have never looked back.  A year ago we bought a new desktop, a laptop (my constant companion), an iPad and two iPhones.  But here's my beef with all of it:  I can't just "open the door and help myself".  It seems I require constant training and with each upgrade I have something new I have to learn (and undo the previous learning.)

So, a year ago when we upgraded everything, we signed up for the One-On-One training we knew we'd need with all our new tech gear.  Then one thing and another prevented us from actually using the lessons and somewhere in the year we were allotted to use them, Apple discontinued the whole One-On-One program!  When we finally wanted to troubleshoot some frustrating issues we were having we had to do a "walk in" appointment with the Apple Genius corps.

Have you been to an Apple store?  Our local outlet is relatively small, but still sleek and modern and full of display models to play with  along with the hordes of people who seem to want to do just that no matter the day of the week or time of day.  It's always jamming crowded and LOUD.  Can't they do something with the acoustics in those stores?  Because here's the thing I notice.  The stores are not generally full of millennials who seem to have some cyber-brain-power that allows them to intuitively just know how to make these devices work.  No.  The stores are full of people with gray hair and bewildered expressions on their faces.  They are gathered round big square tables in the middle of the room trying to hear and follow instructions at a "group lesson" on some tech topic while music plays, people jostle to try out a Macbook Air, lines form to ask a question at the Genius Bar....it's a madhouse.

But we braved it on Tuesday afternoon and got the help we needed on how to set up our iCloud accounts (again!), this time not co-mingling them so that all of Hub's calendar information ended up on my computer and all of my internet searches ended up in his search history (thankfully I have never searched for old boyfriends or porn!)  We also wanted to learn to use the password protection Keychain thing that will keep our account passwords encrypted and not easily guessed by the bad guys.  We listened as an Apple guy (about our age!!!  Shocking!!!) walked us through it all, a little condescendingly, which just galls Hub, since he is sort of an Alpha Male and not used to this treatment which just felt familiar to me as a woman, but I digress...  We left happy and ready to leave our frustrations behind and finally get these things to work as we wanted them to.  Then we got home.

Error messages shot up on my screen every time I tried to open a website or use my email.  Hub couldn't access iTunes to update his apps because an old Apple ID kept insisting he put in a password that no one can recall because it was discontinued eons ago, but somehow Apple insisted it was current.  We spent all evening trying to troubleshoot our way out of the messes that were worse than before we went into the store.  We gave up.

The next afternoon we drove back to the even more crowded and chaotic Apple store and waited again for a Genius to help us.  I was hoping for a different Apple brain and we got one --much younger and geekier than the guy we'd had the previous day and I don't want to sound ageist or anything, but I was glad.  This kid actually had helped us on a previous visit and was smart, quick at diagnostics, saw immediately what had gone awry with Hub's issues, and walked me through a Keychain tutorial that was so easy to understand this time that even I could do it and my Macbook calmed down and went along with the program.

We figure with travel time, including two return trips in rush hour traffic and waiting for a Genius to help us, then finding we weren't really helped, then trying to troubleshoot on our own, then doing it all again the next day, we spent about 10 hours this week just getting our computers to do what they were supposed to do a year ago when they were first set up for us incorrectly.  We had lived with it far too long, I know, but I've come to believe computers are just not that easy and we can't expect  things to go smoothly.  Such defeatist thinking!

I think that attitude is born of being intimidated by a technology I don't understand, that is constantly changing, that I will NEVER understand, and with which I will NEVER keep up and seriously is just too damn complicated anyway.  I could add our "Smart" TVs, satellite dishes, WiFi routers, external DVD drives, Kindles, my car's stereo and navigation system, my new range/oven's computerized controls, etc. etc. etc. to the list of things I regularly use but realize I just barely understand how they work.  If something  goes awry (seemingly often), I am stuck; I do not know how to navigate the troubleshooting guides because they contain language and concepts about which I haven't a clue.  So I limp along only utilizing a fraction of the features I might have access to and all these devices seem like lazy slackers mocking my inability to get them to get off their lazy asses and get some real work done.

Here's my resolution.  I will swallow my pride and admit defeat.  I have been a rare user of "tech support", having found it to be amazingly intimidating in the past.  But the Apple Geniuses have convinced me that these issues for which we spent hours this week driving around with all our Apple gear in the trunk and enduing the chaos of the store could have been handled online or by phone where someone, somewhere could actually see our computer screen (this is maybe a little scary) and walk us through everything, even showing us where to point and click to move things along.  Tech support is going to be my new best friend!  And, I will NOT allow some kid in a cubicle to make me feel dumb when I ask how to sync iTunes on my iPhone.  I screw that up every single time!

My reading about brain plasticity tells me new brain cells are being formed all the time when we learn new skills.  Oh my!  I will be so incredibly smart very, very soon!

At least, that's the view from here....©