I can’t stand routine. The reason I’m basically unsuited for employment is because I can’t abide doing the same thing every day (like reporting to a cube farm at an ungodly hour of the morning and sitting there for eight or more hours). But there are certain low-level subroutines that help my life run smoothly that, when they get disrupted, are way more discombobulating than I expected they would be.
And I’m not even referring to the NYC transit strike, which threw a real spanner in my subconscious works for a few days this week as the autopilot program that walks my legs to the subway stop started crashing when it tried to load itself into my brain. Normally I don’t give any more thought to getting downtown than which book I should take with me to read on the train. Suddenly, I was on edge in that weird way that happens when things that you take for granted stop being there for you.
(In strike-related snark news, check out Jossip’s smackdown of the ever-clueless New York Times’ coverage of walking-
No, before the transit strike it was Typepad, the service that hosts Geek Philosophy, being down for days last week, which is very disconcerting now that I’ve gotten used to throwing crap up on the blog as the mood strikes me. And then I finally conceded that my ancient iBook (maybe six years old) was no longer up to snuff and needed to be replaced -- I kept running into walls online, Web sites that were somehow crippled, and some sites I couldn’t view at all, because I couldn’t upgrade my browser any further because I couldn’t upgrade my system software; the old laptop just couldn’t handle it. Very bad for someone who lives online -- and, more importantly, works online -- like I do.
So although it’s a lot of fun playing with the lovely new iBook, it’s also frustrating in a way that’s hard to articulate. The keyboard feels weird, the system software is subtly different in a hundred ways, new applications need to be purchased and/or downloaded, files need to be transfered -- my everyday necessity of being able to just sit down at the computer and work without having to think about how I’m working was shattered. And that’s before the enormous hassle of working out software conflicts and getting all the programs I absolutely need to use to play nicely with one another. (Forbes.com has a piece up about the horrors of changing computers that goes wrongly easy on Mac users: “[A]t least Apple provides OS X users a slick feature called Setup Assistant, which lets you move everything from an old machine to a new one quickly and painlessly.” Ha! That’s true only if your old machine was sophisticated enough to talk to OS X. Mine wasn’t. I had a helluva time just setting up a tiny Ethernet network so I could get my essential files over the new iBook -- more stress, more lost time, more inexpressible edginess from losing that comforting sense of things just being ready for me when I need them.
It’s amazing, though, how quickly those subprograms do get reprogrammed, though. Just tonight I had to boot up the old machine again to kludge together a fix for yet another incompatibility, and after only a week of using this new iBook, the old one feels strange: the keyboard feels weird, the trackpad is in the wrong place, the screen looks funny...
Oh, and at the same damn time, I also upgraded my antediluvian cell phone. I can’t turn around these days without some machine or other reminding me that technological change can be good but is also very stressful, even when it’s welcome and wanted.
