Patience is a virtue, especially with tech
Relax, slow down, and do not expect your tech to be like a home appliance
Most people, if they know anything about San Francisco, think of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the extraordinary high cost of housing.
One of my everlasting memories of my 20 years there is the shortage of parking. Apartments with parking inside are rare and even more costly. Most everyone street parks. Even Gordon Getty, once the richest man in American has only a two car garage and three cars.
My apartment was in an area with popular nightclubs, so on a weekend night I would take a cab instead of my little Ford Courier. I knew if I drove, I’d spend maybe an hour finding parking when I got home.
Finding a spot for my tiny truck was hard enough. Imagine my friend Shermund and his 20 year old, full size, wood paneled station wagon.
And yet, he could find parking in North Beach on a Saturday night for that huge boat. North Beach is an old Italian neighborhood full of restaurants. It is where Joe DiMagio walked to every day from his home in the Marina to have a beer with other older Italian men. Shermund could find a spot there in front of the restaurant he was visiting almost every time.
Luck or instinct? I’ve seen it happen too many times to be luck. I think from a lifetime spent in San Francisco, he developed an instinct, and a fighter pilots eyesight to see people getting into cars, or spots that only look empty to you and me only when we get close, but he could tell from a distance.
I never had that ability. But I do have an ability making tech work that seems to others to border on witchcraft.
The other day my adult son was trying to get his new game on our home Wi-Fi. It wasn’t working for him. I suggested a couple things, and it still was not working. He handed it to me, and I pushed the same connect button he had pushed a dozen times. It immediately connected for me to my amusement, his frustration and my wife’s sigh. She seen it happen often.
Am I a witch? No, because one of the things I had coached him to do was turn it off and turn it back on. He then tried to connect, and it failed. What happened, I suspect, is the unit had not finished initializing when he tried it, but by the time he walked it over to me it had fully initialized and was ready to connect.
No, its not magical powers with tech that I have, it is patience. It is one of the handful of attributes that can make your life easier with tech. Future newsletters will talk about the others.
Many have the expectation that computers should be as friction free to use as a microwave. Unfortunately we are not there yet, and might never be. Computers just do too many things for us, to be completely predicable and reliable, like a microwave. Many get frustrated when tech needs more effort then we think it should demand. With frustration comes impatience.
We never have to turn are refrigerator off or back on to make it work. Yet if we do that with our computers and our phones, which are really computers too, then they work better. And you have to have the patience to let them fully start up again and properly initialize hardware, like printers, and find the internet and your Bluetooth devices.
And things can be flaky. Often you have to try again. They say doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a sign of insanity. With tech, trying it one or two times more is often a solution. Often it still doesn’t work but sometimes it does.
Comment about a previous newsletter :
I found some interesting multi-outlets that would go well in any travel bag. They have multiple outlets and also USB ports in a convenient size.
Well Mark I assume you know what the nerds on the British tv "The IT crowd" show say whenever a worker needs IT help " did you reboot the computer"!!! As you know it fixes a multitude of errors. Or the ever helpful "unplug the computer count to 10 and plug it back in and restart" that also works.