It's a Techno World

It was dark and raining Wednesday night at 5:30. I drove our '95 jeep down the hill to get the mail at our community mail box and back up the hill toward home, and decided to load up our empty garbage roller bins on the return trip up the driveway. Since the two smaller rollerbins fit in the back hatch (stuffed in on top of the recycling, stuffed in on top of items for Good Will), that left the biggest one. I rolled it alongside the car with one arm stuck out the open driver door in the rain. My purple felted mittens were already sopped with rain water from dumping out the garbage cans before I loaded them up/rolled home. The left one got wetter. It was like camping. I was having an outdoor adventure, in the elements, in the real world.

When I came into the house and, eventually, opened up the mail, I got reminded that it's a techno world.



New mail/old mail. The envelope I opened proved that I'd skipped the November mortgage payment and now was almost late with December's. Forget about the fact that I'd gone over everything carefully December 22nd just before family arrived for the holidays. I'd subsequently ignored the mail for a week. I'd previously incorrectly interpreted the bank's automatic escrow tax payment as a paid mortgage payment in November and not set up the right online payment date for December. I freaked out about what else I might have misinterpreted in my online banking.

I glanced over at my office file tabs. They aren't printed out via a computer-generated list on those perforated labels that come with the plastic holders in the hanging file box like a kit. The file tabs are hand printed. In the techno world my hiding my head in the sand about computer generated setups for tabs has gone on for years -- and look what that's led to! Online banking deficiencies! Challenges to Credit rating! Credit instability!



I went to bed determined to be more aggressive about it all and not settle for techno mysteries any more. Thursday morning I faced the first challenge, ready to program my Christmas pedometer. I cut right through lingering anxiety with my favorite blue handled scissors and peeled back the harshly uncooperative molded plastic packaging.



Who knew that the pedometer's 10,000 steps would just run if you held the reset button for two seconds, or that all information was hidden on the back of the two cardboard flaps encased in molded plastic, along with the slim little instruction booklet I'd just cut in half?

I got out the scotch tape and taped everything back together so I could read about how to begin.

My pedometer is working fine. I found out I walk 5,600+ steps just getting myself in town and doing the usual errands I do there. I ran into a little techno world challenge with the mirror settings on the jeep though. No longer willing to reset the mirrors with the toggle tabs again and hope that my random stabs at "1,2,Set" on the driver door panel would make them stay that way for the next time I started up the engine, I ended a year of haphazard strategy and read the manual.