Getting An Upgrade
Episode 107, Jul 26, 2022, 10:00 AM
Having an IT upgrade is not that exciting to me. I know there are some people who are in heaven at the prospect of a five-point switch box. I’m more of a shoe girl myself.
I accidentally pressed “command y” instead of the “t”. I never knew that this is the shortcut to checking out browsing history. I’ve never felt the need to have a shortcut function to look at what I was looking at yesterday, but there it was: shoes, shoes, shoes and shoes. So, when the IT upgrade came I logged on to office 365 and put my username and password in. Three times I tried and was declined access.
All my bad habits conspired to be revealed as I called the helpline. I wasn’t’ on the office 365 site at all. I was on a well-known shoe shop site of similar name. The dear old search engine was only trying to be helpful in taking me to where it thought I wanted to go. I was only being lazy in my use of my zoom function, which reveals but a fraction of the screen, at any point in time. Oh well, while I was there, surely there was no harm in looking, so I did.
If you use screen magnification it’s probably a good idea to get a bit of IT training to orientate you to the new IT environment in which you find yourself, the majority of which you cannot see. I know this now. Knowing it then would have saved a bit of humiliation. It would have saved me having to ring a colleague to ask what the blob on the bottom right of the screen was. “the calendar,” she said. Then for good measure she added, “the blob on the left is mail.”
I probably should have felt a greater sense of shame at the revelation that I am quite such a tech deficient, but I was grateful.
I probably should have felt a greater sense of shame at the revelation that I am quite such a tech deficient, but I was grateful.
In my upgraded world, I have had a rude awakening. There are a lot of blobs in life that I am clueless about and it seems to me that now is the moment to throw myself on the mercy of my colleagues and hope I am not mocked for these shortcomings. I had also better get on with upgrading my skills.
A long time ago I realised that relying on the Son as the fount of all knowledge was only going to bring misery for us both. Thank goodness he managed to do the basics and I know what a browser is. I’ve also got green and red stickers strategically positioned all over my keyboard, so I know where the shortcut keys are. I just don’t seem to be able to remember what they do.
Upgrading my skills had better be framed as “when it comes to tech I’m an idiot” on the basis it was better to get this observation in before someone else did.
“I doubt that very much,” was the optimistic response.
“I doubt that very much,” was the optimistic response.
As the training session got underway, it became painfully clear, painfully quickly, that it could be some time before I could expect to become an alumni. In my defence I have progressed beyond Dropbox. It’s not just my head that is in the clouds. There’s now an unmitigated stream of consciousness that I have committed to the written format.
I am rather enjoying the potential that my new found skills have to offer. There is just one thing bothering me about all of this. If I ever get to a point where I know what I am doing, what do I have to fall back on when it comes to playing the get out of jail free card?
Image is Siobhain Santry's sketch of Anna.