View from the North 40: The real price of technology upkeep

I just wanted to be a real adult, but it ended up like that Pleasure Island scene in Disney’s “Pinocchio” where our little, wooden, not-a-real-boy makes seemingly innocent, but morally delinquent, life choices and starts turning into a donkey.

This week, my computer asked me — yet again — if I wanted to download the most recent version of my system, and normally — by which I mean every time since the first personal computer arrived in my home — I hit cancel or no or whatever key necessary to get me out of this danger zone.

Or I find my tech-savvy husband, drag him to my computer and stand there pointing at the monitor, grunting in fear, like the first time a neanderthal saw a campfire in a cave. The neanderthal was stupid, it’s just that every other time fire had appeared in the history of neanderthals, it meant lightning strikes and raging wildland fires.

But this time I told myself to just say yes to the computer. I had a fresh backup of my whole system, I had time to wait for the download process, I had time to learn the new setup once it was installed and, by golly, it was past time when I should be taking responsibility for my own technology.

It’s not like I have to do any manual labor or know computer coding to get this upgrade installed, I just have to click a little “yes” button and science magic does all the stuff. I had such high hopes at that very moment.

All dashed.

I could tell the process had a few glitches, as bright red lines of text scrolled through in the lines of codes and processing notes. I was confident that at some point the computer was going to ask me if I was sure I wanted to do this. But, no. It forged ahead to my doom, uncaring of my second-guessing.

The scene was just like how little Pinocchio declared he was friends with Lampwick and they went to the billiards hall to play pool, drink beer and smoke cigars. Pinocchio barely got samples before seeing that partaking in each Disney-inappropriate activity was turning his “friend” into a donkey. But it was too late, wasn’t it. Pinocchio had entered that house of sin, drank the devil’s water, chawed on that stogie and inhaled, so he was doomed to get big ears and a donkey voice no matter how quickly he learned his lessons.

So when I drug my tech guy to my computer and pointed at the monitor, I brayed my distress and apologies like a Disney jackass.

He dropped everything to fix it.

Usually my tech fixes take a short time or just a quick answer, and he jokes, “That’ll be a hundred bucks.” It’s our shtick.

This took more than 24 hours.

In the meantime I still had to work — real work for the newspaper and a paycheck, work that co-workers were relying on me to complete. But now, I was doing it as painfully as any act of penance on my little touch screen thing with a teeny, tiny keyboard. That child-size keyboard is hard to operate with my big, meaty European peasant hands.

My regret was palpable.

In the end, my failed attempt at taking charge of my own tech upgrade cost me.

I jokingly handed my tech guy a hundred bucks from our joint slush fund, and that greedy, little superman took it to put in his own piggy bank. My face, I’m sure, had that classic “Wait. What?” dumbfounded expression.

He said that in the end the fix was simple, he just had to type in "sudo dhclient -v eth0" at the command line. He said that like the, um, irony? Hyperbole? Sarcasm? Onomatopoeia? Whatever was so obvious we’d all get a good belly laugh out of it.

On behalf of myself and the rest of the "Computers for Dummies" support group, I gave him a good, long, knowing head bob and said, "Psshh, yeah. Hah! So heh-yeah … right?"

I shut my mouth about the $100 and decided he was pretty cheap by the hour.

——

To be fair, without prompting he put the money back in the slush fund and said he’d take a haircut from me as payment instead — which cost me some dignity to know that home hair butchering pays much better than column writing at [email protected].