Technology.  It definitely qualifies as a love/hate thing for me.

I mean, I look at the things I can do now that were unimaginable just ten years ago and feel waves of warm snuggly feelings wash over me.  I own what’s essentially a pocket-sized computer that makes phone calls.  A magical device that maintains a joint household calendar to coordinate four human beings’ activities/obligations, lets me text if I don’t have time to call, puts invaluable resources at my fingertips (How many ounces are in a cup again?), and sets off timers and alarms for any situation necessary.

(BrightSide scrolled through my clock settings once and was all what on earth are all these alarms for?!  Ummm, well…I get up at two different times depending on the weekday and another on the weekend/holidays.  There are alarms to remind me to leave for volunteering and to warn me that the bus will be home soon.  I have four different Tae Kwon Do alarms, depending on which class we’re attending, and we have a standing Skype time on Sundays that we would surely lose track of if my phone didn’t give us that 15 minute warning.  Plus there’s the alarm I set for the nights we give the dogs their monthly flea/tick/heartworm stuff.  Now that I look at it in print I guess it does seem a little nutty but hey, if the system works….)

So I love my technology and am pretty good at fixing the glitches.  I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks over the years, usually just enough to keep us from going off the rails, but once in a while I hit a roadblock that jams the works and brings our household to a shrieking halt.

These full stops prompt my calls to Apple support, a lovely and unfailingly polite group of people who by sheer force of will have not once dissolved into hysterical giggles while untangling whatever mess we’ve created.  (I say “we’ve created” because sometimes we really have caused the drama and sometimes I just feel like if I were only a teensy bit smarter I could figure out how to fix the problem myself.)

The latest issue that has me reaching out to Apple is our wi-fi network.  We have a wireless router that should work perfectly well for the size of our house, and it did just fine for a long time.  Then, seemingly out of the blue, it started dropping us off the network.  (ALL of us, which went over like a ton of bricks with the kids when they were in the middle of a Minecraft world, but whatever.)  It seemed particularly odd because the status light would still be shining a lovely green, singing “status is hunky dory,” all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

This is why I found myself on the line a few weeks ago with a kind young man named Daniel, working diligently together to figure out why my wi-fi hated us.  (No, I don’t humanize my technology.  Not at all.)  And this would be yet another example of trouble-shooting that fuels my tech inferiority complex.

Daniel had me perform a combination of key and mousepad clicks that revealed screens I didn’t know existed, screens that displayed information that (even had I found them) would have been Greek to me.  Because frankly, I didn’t have one damn clue what we were looking at until Daniel gave me a brief overview of what the numbers meant.  And even then we’re still talking about an extremely rudimentary understanding…the kind that would make other computer peeps snort into their beer if I tried shooting my mouth off at a bar.  Luckily, I have no social life.  And very few computer peeps. And the ones I do have wouldn’t snort.  But I digress.

It turns out that I’ve been a bit deluded about my living environment.  While I was under the impression that we live in a rural area (there are cow pastures here, for heaven’s sake!), apparently there are an extraordinarily large number of wireless networks in the vicinity (hello, neighbors!) and we’re trampling on each others’ signals.  He discussed noise levels and Tx rates (???) with me, tinkered with the settings on my wi-fi, and sent me on my merry way with the instruction to call back if it starts dropping us again.

We were living the good life for a few weeks there, but after rebooting the system five times in two days last weekend I’ve really got to get him back on the phone to see if we can work this out.  I can handle my own annoyance at being bumped off the network, but dealing with kids whining about technology (Hello! First World Problems!) makes me a bit nutty.