Technology Meltdown

I’m having a technology meltdown. I’ve always considered myself to be fairly tech savvy ( I keep singing "I love technology" from Napoleon Dynamite... you should too as you read this)  I work from home, can navigate my computer with ease, upload social media, newsletter programs, various e-mail accounts…  So I figured an I-phone would be the next logical step. It has everything I need in a phone, and it is supposed to be user friendly, and my Droid was a breeze….

I’ve had less than 12 hours with my phone, and frustrated doesn’t even begin to cover it. I’m mostly mad, because there is this thing, this inert thing that makes me feel so inadequate and incapable… I can follow instructions, I can figure out that when I push the e-mail button, it will probably lead me to set up my e-mail account… however after 2 straight hours of typing/retyping my e-mail address and password, double, triple, quadruple checking for any typos or errors, and the phone still wouldn’t acknowledge my existence I was ready to throw in the towel. Furthermore, the Apps were frozen, stuck on the perpetual facebook download… so close, and yet so far.

I’m not going to lie, there were tears, there were cusswords, there was a lot of shaking of said phone around (poor Toby, seeing his mom have a meltdown/ essentially throw a tantrum) I felt totally helpless. What more can you do that type in the username and passwords that you know to be correct over and over and over again? I finally gave in, and went back to the store… and of course, right on cue, I try to show tech support the issues I’m having, and magically all the passwords work, and aps are downloading left and right, and I look like the biggest tool on the planet. Technology 1, Tayler 0. Furthermore, after I leave the store again, I realize that the 4 hours spent without a phone so all of my pictures/videos/contacts could be transferred, of the some 1,300 images and videos… only 400 were transferred… and as for my contacts, I am missing 2/3rds of them… oh and the ones that I do have, have been entered in 3 times. Dear technology universe, why do you hate me?

What happened to intuitive, and user friendly? Maybe it’s because I’m not a MAC person… but I’m trying… and still, I only have one e-mail account up and running (can it still be considered a work phone if it is physically impossible to set up your work e-mail to sync?) I’m trying to manually enter the other 2/3rds of my contacts, and am planning a rather pleasant reunion with the techies who promised me that in 4 hours all of my pictures would transfer no problem (seriously, did you even check the number. 400 is not 1,300…. Do I need all the pictures, no… honestly most of them are of my bulldog… but I haven’t sorted through the keepers/ non-keepers, and I would like that option.) I’m especially peeved because when I went to pick up my phone 4 hours later, they realized I was missing 2/3 of my contacts, but then decided they couldn’t put them on without deleting all the pictures/ starting over “and we’ve been working on it all afternoon” their response was “well it’s a phone, there is only so much we can do”… It’s an iphone, I thought it was limitless as far as phones go…and I’m not asking for it to perform brain surgery… I’m not even asking it to play videos or for that little Siri character to talk to me… I’m asking for photographs and phone numbers and e-mail accounts that already exist be transferred from one machine to another… In terms of cell-phones, this is elementary…. And you’ve been working on this all day?  Have you really? Again, did you even check the progress… because the phone was not plugged into anything when I got there, and you should have realized sooner that my contacts didn’t transfer/ that I’m missing almost 1000 photos!

And my feelings of sheepishness and incompetence continue, as all of my I-phone savvy friends are asking me what the hell my problem was. One friend said “dude, your grandma could use this phone” (I highly doubt that is true) sigh… I am not smart enough for my smart phone… oh and my electric toothbrush randomly decided it would stop holding a charge and dye beyond repair… sigh…. At least I’ve figured out the Pinterest App….