Yesterday, when my dog wouldn’t come downstairs right away after I called him for his evening walk (what the hell, Chuck?), I realized the world is conspiring to make me ADD. My time management skills need work, and it is pretty easy for me to get sidetracked, I’ll admit it. But my distractibility is not all my fault. And I swear I wasn’t always like this.
I hate waiting. If I have access to anything even remotely interesting (let’s say for the sake of argument, the internet) while I wait, then I go off task.
While I waited for Chuck to get his fluffy ass downstairs yesterday, I got the idea for this post. I found some paper and a pen and started to jot down my thoughts before I forgot them. In the middle of this, Prince Charles Fluffbatten-Windsor finally decided it was time to walk. I made him wait. Apparently he doesn’t like to wait either, so he left the room. Vicious cycle perpetuated.
The ungodly slowness of my work PC has filled my soul with rage. It hates waking up in the morning even more than me. Each morning when I log on, it’s all “WHOA! You again? Back so soon? Hold up, you’re interrupting my REM sleep. I’m dreaming about crashing Outlook when you try to send an email it took you half an hour to craft.”
I hate wasting time, so waiting for my computer to respond to my commands for more than 30 seconds makes me mental. I’ve started angrily muttering to myself like a crazy person. This is charming, No really, take your time, I really don’t have time for this shit, I’d like to take you outside and beat you with a baseball bat, oh hi, Boss!
I start a task, my computer inevitably hangs, tempting me to do something else while I wait. Next thing I know, it’s an hour and a half later and my chai is cold, I have 12 browser tabs open, my iPad on my lap, and a finally-opened window on my PC I can’t remember the purpose of opening.
I wonder how much efficiency is lost due to whatever in the hell gremlin causes technology to screw with us. I guess I could make more effort to stay focused on the task at hand, but I just don’t believe anyone should have to focus on waiting. Plus, they pay me too much to stare at the hourglass on my PC and seeth.
My home computer is starting to behave like this too (Macs, they just work!), only instead of an hourglass I get the spinning beach ball of death. I worked from home today and the beach ball spun in Firefox for 30 minutes when I tried to check my work email.
Maybe my computers are trying to tell me something about work?
I was going to mention the “spinning beach ball of death” and then you did anyway. Ha! I hate that stupid thing. My work computer is a Mac, so I see it entirely too often.
We say that things are faster and more efficient now, but I think between waiting for Adobe updates and things to load that we’re actually spending more time just waiting. I don’t wait well for anything, so I usually get completely ADD and do three things at once. I’m trying to be more patient, but sometimes I can help it…between people and technology, I wonder why the world can’t just revolve around me 😉
Having a PC at work and a Mac at home is mildly confusing, and the PC is definitely slower, but they are both slow.
I kind of ran out of steam so didn’t write about the part where I fruitlessly call IT. Fruitless because they are only authorized to give two answers:
1.) Can I install/do/sync x?
“No.”
2.) My computer is unbearably slow.
“You’re storing too much stuff on it.”
I agree about not being sure things are faster/more efficient now!
Whew! I’m worn out just reading this. I feel your pain with the slowness of the computer. Embarrassed to admit it, I still have dial-up. God help me!
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Beach ball of death – love it. I love Macs but right now mine is going through the same thing. Computers reach old age too fast – something like 3 computer years = 30 human years. That’s worse than dogs!
Yeah, my hard drive was more than 2 years old, which seemed too new to me to be dying…I mean, I hadn’t even really felt like I’d gotten used to the switch from PC yet! But I guess I need to come to grips with how fast computers age. Totally nailed it with the dog analogy!