I am currently reading a New York Times bestseller book titled The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.
Don’t ask me why I choose such things to read but that is the way my mind works. Coincidentally, I just attended a lecture by a PHD professor of digital and data bits and bytes who attempted to teach us all what a great timesaver online buying was. I prefer Kibbles and Bits myself. He went so far as to tell us that in a short time we will be able to place our supermarket orders online and have them delivered, even to the point of having someone there to squeeze the tomatoes to be sure that they are firm. How do I get a job like that?
The idea of saving time by electronic online ordering is frankly totally foreign to me. Let me explain why. When I decided to order this book, I did, as I have done many times in the past, go to Amazon online to order it. One problem: all I could get was a sample.
No matter how many times and how many buttons I pushed saying that I wanted to order the full volume of the book, all I could get was a sample. After spending approximately five hours trying to order it my darling wife did me a favor and ordered a Kindle Fire device so that I could order my book from Kindle and get it immediately as she has done so many times on her unit.
Amazingly the Kindle Fire arrived two days later and I was thrilled that I would now be able to order my book. One problem however: my Kindle required an update, even though it was new out of the box. That should be a simple procedure except in order to update I had to create a new account for me and my Kindle and a whole bunch of other stuff. This took approximately another five hours until I was finally able to place an order for this book about how to save time.
I could easily have gone to my car, driven to the local book store, picked up one, brought it home and have read at least half by the time I was able to simply download the original. You can perhaps recall me talking about seeing paper books in a store that you could actually buy and take home and read with no technical knowledge whatsoever. It is beginning to sound much more attractive to me now. Frankly, this is just one of my misadventures in using a computer.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a complete idiot and have had computers since the days we went to a store and simply said give me one of those. I learned everything there was to learn about them and felt pretty confident for a while.
Frankly they have now outstripped my knowledge and/or ability to keep up. Does anyone really know which version of Windows is the proper one to be using now? I started with XP and then went through the numbers. I believe I am up to seven now.
However even if you have the latest number which I believe is 10 you must still update your computer which may or may not allow you to do this depending on which version of Windows 10 you have. Whew! Of course with all the new security things in place I have now used just about every possible password combination that might exist and I’m constantly advised that I can no longer use something that I’ve used in the past. That is assuming that I have the correct login name. I have a huge spreadsheet with literally hundreds of passwords and usernames that I am constantly being asked to change because they will not be accepted by whatever program I am trying to use.
Well here is another idea. Take a piece of paper, write a message on it, and place it in an envelope to be delivered to another person. More than likely that person will open the envelope and read the message because after all, how many actual envelopes with letters inside will they receive as opposed to the approximately 200 emails a day that I get in my computer. Sorry, folks, I really try but I can tell you right now the chances of my actually seeing your email are minimal at best. I just don’t have the time.
Watch for that man walking down the street with the heavy leather bag over his shoulder placing letters in a box in front of your house and be amazed that this can actually work. Oh, well!
