Technology: Harder than It Looks

I love me some technology. Whether it’s editing movies on my iPad, playing games on my PC, or tinkering with webpages online, I’m a self-confessed technogeek. But for as much as I love technology, it’s easy to start to take it for granted. To just assume it’s always going to be simple to use.

Until it isn’t.

The thing is, you never quite know when it’s going to bite you. When you’ll be trying to do something straightforward, only to have to stare in confusion at a screen for a few hours. Sometimes it happens with my A/V system at home. Something goes wrong, and the next thing I know I’m up to my eyeballs in Google searches as I try to figure out why the sound has stopped working. Or something might break on a webpage, and so it’s off to the internet to look for solutions.

Typically these things happen with areas of technology that I’m only generally familiar with. I can get through them on my own, but it takes a long time of research and study to figure out how to do just what I want. Of course, at the end of all that study, I’m good to go, but then I set it and forget all about it . . . until it breaks again, and I’ve forgotten all about how I set it up in the first place.

This also happens when I try to do something I’ve never done before. I’ll approach a new task with an “I’m sure it can’t be that difficult” attitude, only to discover just how difficult it is. Sometimes it’s the very nature of technology that makes it seem straightforward. For example, say you have a VHS copy of a movie, and you want to get that copy onto YouTube. They’re both videos, right? Moving pictures and audio? Isn’t there some sort of . . . cable that could connect your old VHS player to your computer and . . .

Off you go to Google.

(For the record, the way I’ve done it in the past is transfer the VHS to DVD, and then the DVD to mp4, and then upload the mp4 files to YouTube. But all of that takes a lot of time. For a half hour movie, expect it to take you an hour or so, and that’s once you’re familiar with the process.)

That said, I’ll still take technology any day over the old fashioned way of doing things. Because 90% of the time it’s easy peasy, and that’s worth 10% of pain in the rear.

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