Battling with technology

Having a Geek in your life is a mixed blessing. On one hand you have as much help as you could possibly want on those technical irritations, on the other life appears to be far more complicated than I ever remember it being. Before meeting Hugo I lived on my own. My technical life was simple: I did not have problems programming the video because I didn’t own one ( or a telly for that matter) or lights which went on & off per a complex computer program which varied them according to day, seasonality and weather conditions.

Don’t get me wrong – I do appreciate the enhancement these things bring to my life. I was burgled as my house was swathed in darkness when I was late home from work and I couldn’t turn on the manual light timers via the Internet. I wasn’t aware of Sex in the City or Top Gear (life without Top Gear just doesn’t bear thinking about). And I couldn’t video call my friends & family for free.

It’s just that I’ve got used to all this now, so when it’s taken away I’m stranded and don’t know how to sort it out. You’d think (being my husband) my help would be 24/7 but it’s not. More often than not he is at work, often in another time zone which means at the critical time he could even be asleep! Disaster. And my fumblings usually exacerbate the problem. You see I don’t really do instructions so I just continue pressing buttons until said item breaks or decides finally to co-operate.

Take the time I was listening to Woman’s hour on the BBC’s listen again service (without which I really don’t think I could survive here – but US TV & radio is a whole kettle of fish for another time) when my domestic duties took me to another room in the apartment. I carefully moved my Mac but in the process pressed a key which turned off the sound. Being a lifetime PC user who has recently turned to the Mac (funnily enough at the point where Hugo started receiving the Apple discount) I’m still finding my way through the buttons and decided in true PC style that rebooting would be the best course of action. Said Mac came back to life with exactly the same settings so I pressed all the function keys. The sound returned I’ll grant you as did the robotic voice who described everything I did. I can understand how useful this could be if you have impaired vision but for me at the moment having a Stephen Hawking type robotic voice talking over Jenny Murray is becoming a little tedious.

Of course IT support did get back to me in the end though. ☺

Hugo: There's fn-f3 (mute), fn-f4 (vol down) and fn-f5 (vol up). If you do vol up it should come back
Hugo: There's an icon of a speaker at the top right of the screen which shows how loud it is
Sent at 5:49 PM on Tuesday
Claire: Thanks.
I managed to fix it myself in the end but have managed to turn on Stephen Hawking whilst I was pressing every button on the keyboard. Lovely though it is to be told everything that’s going on - how do I turn him off? xxxx
Sent at 6:33 PM on Tuesday
Hugo: Go to the control panel, go to universal access, and turn off voiceover
Claire: Thanks
Hugo: x
Sent at 7:21 PM on Tuesday
Claire: Err…Where is the control panel? xxxx
Sent at 8:05 PM on Tuesday
Hugo: It's the thing on the bottom of the screen with an apple and a switch?
it's called system preferences
Claire: Ah OK - got it! xxxx
Sent at 8:34 PM on Tuesday