Clock Calisthenics
I realize that it was cruel to leave that last post at the top for so long. Let’s see how far down we can push it.
It’s 6 am and, due to the time change, it already seems like a long day. I allowed myself to be sweet-talked into returning to Milwaukee this week, and I’m at Seatac waiting to board my plane. I’ll be time’s plaything today, a temporal yo-yo. It started, of course, with the “fall-back” early this morning. I’ll fly first to Detroit and spend an hour or less in EST, then hop back across Lake Michigan to spend the week in the equivocal climes of the Central time zone. When you do the math, I guess it ends up only being an hour’s dislocation. I posit, in any event, that I really am my own time zone anyway, and I claim something like diplomatic immunity from the petty jurisdictions imposed by geography.
I hate to let my mom know that I flew through Detroit without popping down I-75 to see her in Perrysburg. We’ll see each other in a couple weeks, though, when she, my brothers and I gather in Charleston, SC for our annual oyster roast and OSU-Michigan gamewatch.
Meantime, she called me Friday with a problem with her computer, but I was at a client’s and couldn’t get back to her until Saturday (after, of course, the OSU game was over). Her screen was frozen with strange stuff all over it that she tried to describe and I tried to visualize. I finally just had her power down & back up and, as with 99% of all computer problems, that resolved the issue. Turned out she had been turning the computer and peripherals off by simply pulling the plug instead of doing the Windows shutdown. While it’s arguable that today’s vacuum cleaners are both more complicated and more useful than a PC, a PC’s operating system is more finicky and less bullet-proof, and you can’t operate them the same way.
One amusing thing, that I wish I had video of: she said that she struggled for over an hour with the computer on Friday night, then gave up & went to bed. Once in bed, though, she became so angry that she couldn’t sleep, and got up and struggled with it for a couple more hours. I think I’d really enjoy the video if it came with sound.
Sorry to use you for a prop, Mom. It was the best material I could come up with.
My mom calls with PC problems quite often. I always have to tell her that I use a mac and can’t really understand or visualize the problem she is trying to describe. I wish there was a really user-friendly PCs for Grandmas with simple on/off switches, email, photos, and internet.
Good luck being “time’s plaything” today.
We did the time zone adjustment thing at our house, too. My dementia must be kicking in, though, since I noticed a while later that I’d adjusted two different clocks by an hour, but each in the opposite direction. I was momentarily confused, not knowing whether it was 10:30 am or 12:30 pm, a problem I solved by asking time.gov. Glad my computer wasn’t broken, or I’d still be looking from clock to clock, wondering whether “anybody really knows what time it is.”
Even though I’m a skosh younger than your mother, I suspect she and I inhabit the same region of ComputerLand: You use the blankety-blank thing often enough so that it becomes a huge and necessary part of your life, but you never quite did take the time to learn too terribly much about it. (It’s sorta like studying a foreign language, i.e., that stage where you can easily phrase questions and make statements, but struggle mightily to translate the answers….)
Oh, and time change? I’m never ever ever going to complain about a situation that grants an extra hour’s sleep. Have fun flying hither ‘n’ yon, though…