A bad tech week

dead Kindle, photographed by live iPad

I hate knowing just enough about technology to build a lot of my life around it but never master it. I have come to expect that technology will never work when you need it.

Last Sunday I gave a multimedia presentation in church on my Congo trips. Anticipating difficulties, I made my tech needs known in advance so the church techies could help me be prepared. On their advice I got a VGA adapter. This required a special trip to the Mac store and $31.

VGA adapter. Isn't it cute?

Ten minutes before the presentation the projector seemed to be collaborating with my Mac. But I had to disconnect the computer to move it to a different place and then it didn’t work. After many trials and errors and shutdowns and restarts, another techie came over and helped. It involved something on the display menu, who knew. And then the sound connection didn’t work, apparently because of a dented plug. My presentation started 15 minutes late, unamplified. People were patient and thanked me afterward but I found the whole thing exhausting.

This all lived up (down) to my expectations. I am convinced technology is out to defeat us.

Last spring before my first trip to Congo, Nina, my fellow traveler, suggested that I might interview some people connected with the centennial story project, which I’d been editing. She said she’d shoot the video and edit it into a short piece to use in connection with the book release. Nina is a great photographer so I agreed. I even got some support for our trip based on this venture.

Nina passed the raw video on to me on a memory card in a digital recorder, which she loaned to me for the second trip. I needed to look at it to suggest edits. However, I never used the digital recorder. I felt defeated just looking through the manual. Consequently, I never tried to look at the video until recently, when Nina herself withdrew the card, stuck it into my computer, and transferred the file.

The file was not readable or viewable by my Mac.

After some internet research I concluded that she needed to go through another step to make it viewable. We got together again to do this. (We do not live close to each other.) It didn’t work. In the process my Mac swallowed Nina’s DVD and refused to reveal it, though it did cough it up with a restart. Later when my husband tried both the DVD and a memory stick file on his PC they didn’t work there, either. As I write, the video is still a prisoner of Nina’s computer. It may never escape.

At the end of that day I was carrying my supper into the living room to watch a bit of consolation TV while I ate, alone. Vic was out. As I was sitting down my water glass slipped out of my hand and bounced off the coffee table. Miraculously, it didn’t break. That was because it came down on my Kindle rather than directly on the glass tabletop. It knocked the Kindle screen into a funny pattern. Water splashed onto one of the wireless headsets we use to watch TV and DVDs because we are going deaf. I drained and dried it the best I could but got nothing but static.

The Kindle is gone for good but a few hours later the headset recovered. Phew.

I expected my techie, money-conscious husband to be upset with my klutziness but he was philosophical when I reported all this. I had already replaced the Kindle with another piece of more complicated technology, the iPad. We were hoping to use the Kindle/iPad combination to read the same e-books but we seldom read the same books anyhow. I told him I’d looked into replacing the headphone, which would have cost $57. “That’s not so bad,” he said.

That same day I got a nice email from the pastor thanking me for a really good Congo presentation and apologizing for the tech problems.

While technology always fails, sometimes people come through.