Yeah, I’m back! What started out as a two-week hiatus to tweak my blog turned into a six month life-and-death struggle with technology. It was man versus the machine, and the machine had me outgunned and surrounded. (Now I know how John Conner felt.)
The problem was (and still is) that I’m a man of the 20th century, and two decades into the future I just haven’t caught up. Let me put this into perspective – the difference, in years, between 2022 and 1990 (when I still thought I was cool) is the same as the difference between 1990 and 1958! No wonder I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve become my grandfather trying to understand television.
In the beginning, everyone from YouTube to the teenagers at BestBuy said it was easy to upgrade my blog -- get a new theme, add stunning graphics, put in add-ons and plug-ins and an endless supply of apps. Lying bastards! I clicked one icon (I swear it was one icon) and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, my Cyber-presence (is that even a word, anymore?) looked like
the Wreck of the Hesperus, and I was the one lashed to the mast. Three or four days and a variety of increasingly creative obscenities later, I knew I needed professional help -- but that just made things worse. Every time I tried to explain or get some answers from the techies, I felt like a medieval peasant asking the priests for directions to heaven. And no matter how faithfully I followed their instructions, I kept finding myself further and further away from salvation. For the next few weeks (that turned into months) I alternated between unholy despair and increasingly creative curses on everyone from Johannes Gutenberg to Bill Gates. I thought (seriously) about just pulling the plug – all of them – even the toaster. Beca
use, believe me, rock bottom has a basement.
But we folk of the 20th Century are made of stern stuff. Yeah, the 2000s have crazy jihadists, Vladimir Putin and this petulant pandemic, but I survived Disco, Cabbage Patch Dolls and 80s slang (gnarly?) so the Taliban, Vlad and Covid, don’t scare me – and, come to find out -- neither does omnipotent technology.
“You’re not God, you pile of plastic and silicone! In
another life, you’d be somebody’s fake boob. I run this keyboard. And don’t you forget it!”
And in one glorious act of liberation, I swept the carnage into a separate folder and deleted it. So, from here on in, I don’t care about URLs, SEOs, analytics, portals, platforms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, cuz I finally remembered one thing. On the other end of my computer screen, there’s a person – not an algorithm!
It’s 2022. Happy New Year, everybody!