This is going to be a short post about the brilliance and frustration of technology. AKA the domino effect. Recently, my family got me a beautiful new Apple Watch in a sophisticated blue colour. As instructed, I connected it to my iPhone and started to explore it and discovered it was lacking some features I wanted. So I hunted around in Apple Support and found I had to upgrade the watch's OS, which I did, and then it was perfect. But it decided to also talk to my laptop, which I hadn't expected. It could turn it on, for example, and it made my phone go dark and put it in bedtime mode after I told the watch when I planned to be in bed.
All this was fine until this week, when Facebook started to go nuts, jumping around whenever I tried to scroll through my feed. Rebooting Safari and even turning off the whole computer didn't help. I upgraded the laptop's OS to the latest. Still no dice. So it was back to the internet, where I found lots of people had complained about FB skipping and there were numerous websites and youtube videos claiming to have fixes. I found the most common ones and did one of those; I cleared the browser's history. I was about to clear all my "caches" as recommended, but was leery of losing a whole lot of data and function.
Then I noticed many posts of FB complaining about the same thing. So I held off on the cache purge. This morning FB seemed to be behaving better, but my calendar reminded me it was my time to post on Type M. I clicked on the link on my banner, then on the little orange icon at the top, which always takes me to the admin page. This time... nothing. It just took me to the blogger main page. Blogger had never heard of me, I didn't have a blog, did I want to create a blog?
I fiddled around with Google accounts and passwords, queried my blog mates and finally got back on the internet, this time finding the Blogger "Help Centre". Here there was a useful link about "Why can't I sign in to my blog?" Essentially I had to be invited back in by the administrator, and once she did that - Thank you, Charlotte!- here I am. Out of Blogger exile. Apparently in clearing my history, I had also erased the crucial connection that allowed me admin access to the blog.
All of this because Facebook freaked out and I ventured down the treacherous path of trying a DIY fix. Fixing one thing (in fact, it didn't fix it) caused a cascade of other things to go wrong, and I have lost the better part of two days, not to mention considerable hair, trying to figure out how to fix them, instead of writing the erudite blog on storylines which John's post inspired and I had planned.
So instead you're getting this blog on the daily small frustrations that eat away at our time and creativity. I also wonder what other unpleasant screw-ups are waiting for me that I have yet to discover. Did I inadvertently erase some other crucial piece of information, or is it all the fault of my new Apple Watch, which looks so innocent and pretty displaying the time on my wrist.
No wonder i like to write my first draft with a pen on yellow pads of paper.
