Monday, February 18, 2008

Pigging technology.

I swear technical things all go wrong in phases, or maybe I just notice it more when they break down en masse.

Today:
1. Intermittent broadband connection at home.
2. I've accessed my email for approximately ONE WHOLE MINUTE since Friday before I got chucked out again earlier.
3. My Freeview box is completely dead.
4. The rubbery buttons on the TV remote control have gone all soft since I left it by the radiator, so instead of letting me tune in terrestrial channels, I got black fingers as the buttons disintegrated and then it stopped working. So I've got blurry ITV and Channel 5 and that's it. Only blurry CSI and The Bill to look forward to for light relief from marking.... sigh. Now I'm superstitiously nervous of touching the DVD player in case that blows up too.

Maybe it's a sign that I should be marking dissertations solidly for a while, but it's put me in a really bad mood.

Tuesday: Feeling slightly smug, though it's not a very nice attribute really, is it! I am gratified to find the email problem is a university network one and not me or my kit, so I don't have to do anything to fix it and I was the first one to report it. I was vaguely suspicious when the new techie temp said as no-one else had rung in the problem to the helpdesk, it couldn't exist. Also, he seemed to think as he could log in to a pc within the uni network, it meant there couldn't be a problem for anyone accessing it from home. I was too polite to pursue that, and anyway, I'm not very technical these days. The only thing worse than a know-it-all user is a rude one, and I try not to be either. Being smug from a distance is ok occasionally though! Now, I'd better get on with that marking, I suppose...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

In which case, Claire, forgive us if we just keep outa your way for a bit! lol.

Claire said...

Not so bad today actually, a bit less annoyed! Life goes on.

Katy Swift said...

I'm techy hopeless and still get very excited by my digital radio. However I just discovered downloading TV - I'm so cutting edge ;)

Glad that the intranet thingy has been sorted and yay you for flagging it.

Claire said...

I think it's good to get excited by techie stuff, whatever it is.

So boring when it goes wrong though! A friend had 4 electronic and technical things go wrong in the same week, so we thought maybe there was some strange inter-planetary activity that hovered briefly over our homes and blew up our devices. A bit like the rift in Torchwood without the aliens. Should probably have had better things to do than idly speculate on things breaking en masse but there you go!