Blinded by the Light

I woke up early today for no good reason. Just got up with the sun. It's on days like these I most appreciate being a Corona shut-in because I can take a nap. I LOVE naps! I've said it before, but just an hour long nap makes me feel so great! Like I'm getting away with something. I'll be taking one or even TWO today no doubt. And the sleep! It's probably double the value. It's one of those wonders of nature that can't be explained. Yeah. For sure. Around noon probably. In MY life, this is what passes for a nooner. There's no WAY I'll be pulling an all-dayer today!

So I slowly worked my way out of bed by updating my games, checking email, messages, Facebook, and some other sites. Then switched from phone to computer and had coffee and toast at my desk while verifying the lyrics of the soundtrack of my last dream before waking up. Manfred Mann no less. Blinded by the Light. Not racked up like a deuce, another roller in the night, but revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night. So with a boulder on my shoulder and feeling kind of older, I tripped the merry-go-round. Then some silicon sister with a manager mister told me I got what it takes. Meanwhile Go-cart Mozart was checking out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside, and little Early-Pearly came by in his curly-whirly and asked me if I needed a ride. Coincidentally, that was exactly what my dream had been about!

Well, almost. Actually, I write the above because as I opened up Facebook, I was reminded of a post that I had made two years ago. At the time I was feeling much like I did last night and posted the following: So I type, "How to disable autocomplete on my Kindle." Well actually I type " How, " which becomes "Haw," which is underlined in red squiggly. Now I have " Haw t, " because I typed the t before I realized "How" was changed to haw even though I hadn't even typed "hee" before it. I backspace and retype "How" but autocomplete inserts a space so now I have "H ow," which is also underlined in red squiggly because evidently autocomplete suggests words that don't exist. I say to the 14-year-old in the room, "I thought electronic devices were supposed to make life easier." He says, " They do! "

As I sit imagining back to a better time when I wasn't so boulder-on-my-shoulder older and that hit song came out, not the original by The Boss in '73, but the one released in '76 by Manfred Mann, the one I listened to in my dream as I was boot-skiing down a hill, taking a steep ramp and doing a lay-out back flip with a half twist, (I'm not kidding, that was part of my dream!) I'm struck by the massive advances in science and technology since I was nine or ten and first getting into music that wasn't my Mother's. All those lyrics, and the fact that Bruce Springsteen wrote that song, did I know all that at 5:30 when I got up today? Nope. For most of my life I thought that song was about a douche and someone getting wrapped up in it somehow. ??? And by the way, what's a douche? I didn't KNOW!

Not a lot of people KNEW the actual lyrics either. And how could we? We had to buy the record, (this was before we could tape the song off the radio on our ghetto blasters (a term I cringe to type - can you imagine THAT term catching on today?)) put our heads as close to the speakers as possible, crank up the volume and guess. Just guess. And we had to live with that. Yet somehow, even though every one of our friends had a different hearing of the lyrics, they didn't disparage all of society and its mass ignorance at not hearing what they had heard. We didn't engage in death threats to family and pets of people who differed in their hearing of the song. We waited to hear it from the experts. The only experts. Not even Dick Clark if he had Manfred Mann on American Bandstand could be trusted. We had to hear it from the band, or the Boss. Then we knew it was fact.

Today we can find out in a minute by Googling the lyrics.

So science and technology HAS made things easier in some ways. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't use it every day, in fact DEPEND on it every day. But last night when I was trying to post a new assignment for my online students, I wasn't thinking of the positive side to technology. It was a lesson I'd made long ago for a class of Koreans on present tense and adverbs of frequency. Sometimes, never, once in a while, usually, seldom, etc. Well, what do you know? This week's lessons for my kiddies included present tense and adverbs of frequency. So why not use the same lesson? Sounds easy but it turned into a technological nightmare.

The problem began during the video. I have to make a video at least 20 minutes long, each week. In it I review the past week, give pointers on common mistakes I saw made, give kudos for good things I saw, then introduce the topics for the week, the book assignments and I give them one assignment to be submitted online to me. I usually show them in the syllabus (Microsoft Word document) where we are. This week I had made a summary of my video in written form (Microsoft Word document). And I wanted to show them the old handout I had made years before. I had listed things at the bottom of the handout such as, brush your teeth, visit your grandparents, check your email, sleep in, etc. I had used it as a conversation class handout so I had just typed, "Talk with your partner or partners about how often you do the following..." I changed that to "Write 10 questions and answers about how often you do the following..." Then I tried to save it onto my desktop as a new file. What I got was, "Syllabus save." So I tried again. "Week 8 Lesson saved." I tried several more times but I just couldn't save the new, slightly modified handout to my desktop. But it showed up as saved to the desktop (about 6 times) IN Microsoft Word. And I was able to keep all three MSWord files open. So I made the video. That went okay. But when it came time to upload the handout, and the assignment, to the university LMS, I couldn't do it.

Microsoft Word gets confused when you have more than one of its programs open at the same time. I have a pirated copy of Word (I mean, who doesn't?) so it might be a glitch in the copy, or the actual program might be messed up. Either way, I was sure the second it happened, that I'd encountered this before. Maybe once, maybe 10 times. I sometimes take a long time to pick these patterns up. If you try to save something to your desktop, I guess it has to go through its flawed computer brain about 50 trillion times that you want to save THIS document, not the other two. And that can take up to SECONDS! Even MINUTES! Excruciating! But when you try to save the file 6 times... well then you're into some seriously frustrating time wasting. And if you don't know what's happening because the last time it happened, you said to yourself, "I won't need to remember this because it won't come up again. When will I ever open multiple files in Word again?" And the time before that. And the time before that...

What makes things worse is the brief glimmer of hope you get when the message comes up that the file you are trying to save will need to be converted into a more recent version of Microsoft Word. Is this okay? "Ah HA!" you exclaim. That must have been the problem. So you click "allow" and it changes to a more modern version of MS Word and disappears into the netherweb again.

That's when you start doing desperate things. You start throwing your mouse, gently so it doesn't break, but roughly enough to let the gods of technology know how furious you are. Then you bang on your desk and swear a bunch of times as you try to save again, only compounding the problem. Then, as a last resort, you seek help on the internet. "Why can't I save a Microsoft Word file to my desktop?" you type into Google. You get some other person's plea answered by computer people who shouldn't be answering average people's pleas. "Well it is not recommended that you save any programs to your desktop. Here's what you do: you open up a ghost file using your ACR configuration in some upper gump font. But first you're going to need to change the ftp protocol icon in your registry. It's super easy!"

You wade through all of THAT self aggrandizing crap until you come to, "Open up Windows explorer, go into view, then change desktop setting, then check "show hidden files" and uncheck "don't show hidden files." So you do all that and voila... your file STILL doesn't show up on your desktop. But you still try to save it a few MORE times further compounding your problem.

Then you search another thread and find, "Have you tried refreshing your desktop? Just right click on your desktop and then choose "refresh." "AAhhhhhh, I KNEW there had to be a simple solution!" you say. So you go ahead and do that and finally, your problem has not been solved. But you do a couple more test saves, just to be sure. Further compounding your problem.

So, like usual, if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. I started searching all over my computer to see if all those files had been saved in another place even though every one of them I had definitely chosen the desktop as their destination. They were all showing up in Microsoft Word itself marked as "saved to desktop," but I couldn't see them on the desktop and I couldn't drag them and drop them to the desktop from Microsoft Word itself. I tried copying, transferring, exporting as pdf, you name it, I tried it. Meanwhile a couple hours have been wasted.

Finally I looked in Windows Explorer under "recent" and there were about half a dozen word docs marked saved to desktop, and a few pdf's with the same designation even though exactly NONE of them actually appeared on my desktop. So, I minimized my screen, selected one of the pdf's and dragged and dropped to the desktop. IT WORKED! I now had one of those files on the desktop. I needed that because on the uni's LMS, Canvas, files can be uploaded from your desktop, but not from Microsoft Word or some other locations. In fact I just make pdf's because some or all MSW files don't even show up as files that can be uploaded. But pdf's work. And as you see your successfully saved to desktop pdf appear, there's an oddly faded Word file taking shape on your desktop. MS Word is nearing completion of the 50 trillion checks on the first of 15 files you unsuccessfully tried to save to your desktop. WHY I OUGHTA....

Something that should have taken an hour took FOUR! Can any among us think of all the great knowledge and entertainment technology and computers have brought us at times like these? Well if you can, I envy you. And I bet it won't be long before I open up a few MS Word files simultaneously again and say to myself, "What harm could it do?"

I depend on technology almost as much as I depend on essentials like water, air and... light. But sometimes I am blinded by the light. I thank you.