Saturday, August 24, 2013

Frustration


I haven’t really liked my HP Pavilion Laptop since I bought it about five years ago.  The keyboard was just enough different from my desktop keyboard that I could not type anything without errors.  Plus the touch pad constantly reset to active meaning that if I accidentally touched it, my curser would fly off to someplace on the screen without my realizing it before I had gone on typing.  Frustrating as all get out!

Added to the keyboard frustration was the fact that after moving to Dallas, OR I had to use Charter Communications for my Internet service.  My response on surfing was so slow or would hang that I felt like I was back to my original 40MB, yes, 40 megabite hard drive and tiny RAM that was state of the art in the 80s.  The frustration over the last few months became increasingly worse.  This morning I reached my limit, after trying all day yesterday and this morning to fix some program error.

I am NOT PROUD of myself, but in frustration I raked my hands in anger across the keyboard several times.  SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT!  I ended up with the letter “U” key remaining depressed and unusable.  (The fact that it was the letter "U" is not lost on me!)  I managed to fix it, sort of, after checking tech sites online, but it did not come easy.  I opened a MSWord blank document and checked all keys in both regular lower caps and caps lock.  Everything works fine except for the “U” key, which has to be depressed a little harder than the others.  I am a fast typist (part of the reason I have been frustrated with this keyboard in the first place) and to have to remember to strike the “U” harder than the other keys is craziness for me!

About now (after having to back up and hit the “U” key again, twice), I find the humor in it all.  I also hope I have discovered how stupid it is to hit a machine!!!  Sometimes my impatience at not being “perfect” gets in the way of enjoying the simpler things like taking TIME to smell the roses, or in the case of my laptop keystrokes, taking time to let the machine do whatever it needs to do to accomplish the task at hand.  Oh, the best way I have found to do that is to walk away and do something else while it grinds away at the task!



Hahahahahaha!

1 comment:

Optimistic Existentialist said...

I think we've all lost our temper with a machine before...I know I certainly have!!!