(This is the Online column, written for The Southland Times)
Oh it’s been such a fraught week or so of technological trials.
I headed back to the office on Monday last week after a nice little two-week holiday spent organising my son’s 21st, mixing cocktails, sampling said cocktails and generally lazing around at home enjoying the novelty of dodging the cold weather.
On my arrival at work on that cold and dreary Monday morning, I discovered the the computer-geek fairies had been busily working away on our systems over the weekend and we had a flash new one in place. Only problem was, the flash new system didn’t like me: after I changed my password as instructed, it decided I didn’t exist.
I resisted the temptation to go home and persevered, eventually rejoining the matrix, or Skynet, or something.
Technology failure part two came just a couple of days later when, having sat down in front of my computer at home on Tuesday night to write a finely crafted but time-sensitive column on whether or not iPads would be here before the end of winter, I emailed it to myself at work expecting it to be waiting in my inbox when I arrived back at the office the next day.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. Somewhere in the interwebs, a cyber-dog ate my cyber-homework.
Of course we all now know that tomorrow’s the day for the awesome iPad, so my question was answered before you even knew I’d asked it (anyone else hearing the faint tinkling of the Twilight Zone theme?)
They say things come it threes, and thanks to Sky TV, that old saying has lived up to the hype: My Sky, you promised so much.
We got past all the initial hiccup of the decoder freezing last year but just lately the whole thing’s been out to get me.
If you have My Sky, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is the “series link” option. For those of you who haven’t decided to drink the My Sky Kool-Aid yet, series link is where you can push one little button on your remote control to set the decoder to record every episode in a series.
This is great for someone like me, who has a tendency to lose track of what day of the week it is. However, lately the series link system has been misbehaving, randomly dropping everything on series link for a sometimes a whole day, other times just one programme on that particular day.
I missed NCIS because of this and very nearly missed the final episode of Grey’s Anatomy (gasp! Sky, you very nearly had a riot on your hands over that one).
My final technological failure of the week was a broken fingernail. Okay, so some of you out there might not class a broken fingernail as a technological failure but it was one of my favourites, cultivated to have a nice sharp edge that was perfect for peeling oranges and as an anti-snoring device for my husband.