Technical Difficulties

Due to technical difficulties, this blog is being published on Monday rather than Sunday. I still have not had internet set up at my apartment, since I will be moving again this week, but there are several open networks I had been able to tap into... until last night. Suddenly, the friendly unencrypted network named "default" was gone, and had been replaced by an encrypted network called "CHRIST." Seriously. I ask you, what is the message in someone naming a network after their divine, and then closing it off to the rest of the world??

Due to the aforementioned technical difficulties, I scrapped the original posting I was working on (a nice warm-fuzzy one about working on a Peace House build in downtown Jackson) and have decided to focus instead on technical difficulties. This blog is supposed to transcend my own experience and attempt to probe the universal (nothing like a nice, easy goal), but this time I'm curious: is this a universal phenomenon? Does everyone have the same battle scars from strange tech wars that I do? Does anyone?

Technical, and specifically technological difficulties, have long been a theme in my life, and for this I blame my mother. My mother is certainly a more wounded soldier in the tech wars than I am. She has something that our family has dubbed the Personal Electro-Magnetic Forcefield, or PEMF. Due to her PEMF, my mom is something of a mutant. She has this bizarre, uncontrollable power to alter every clock she touches, any car she drives, any household appliance she so much as looks at. Maybe at one point I doubted the power of the PEMF, but I have been a believer for years now. When she inhabits their space, clocks literally stop working, people. She even made a microwave explode once.

As you might imagine, then, technical difficulties are pretty routine for our family. We long ago learned to just plan around mom's PEMF, by adopting some simple principles: if a drop of rain falls, the power will go out at my parents' house, so always have candles and flashlights. Expect frequent car breakdowns, so always have a cell phone and some high-calorie snacks in the trunk. Do not let her touch the DVD player.

The fear is now that I might have inherited the PEMF. Like an X-Man's mutant powers, it does not always manifest until early adulthood, and then suddenly, BAM: your physiological construction is just different, and you have to live with it. The evidence is mounting for the existence of my own PEMF. To highlight just a few indicators:

• My car has seizures that the mechanics can't explain.
• My cell phone sometimes calls me. (Seriously, sometimes the phone rings and when I answer it, it's my voicemail. And it was calling with a call-ring, not my voice-mail beep, and there are no new messages. I can't explain it.)
• Wireless networks appear and disappear when I touch my Mac.
• My Mac, a laptop I purchased due to the "Macs never crash" mantra invoked by all Macaholics, frequently crashes. And every time I re-start it, the time/date is set to 7pm Wednesday, December 3, 1969, so none of my programs will work until I correct the time/date. Every time.
  

There appears to be nothing I can do, so the goal now is to learn to master the PEMF. It has been suggested that if my mother were to go and hug all the nuclear bombs in the world, they would all be instantly disarmed. Perhaps her technical difficulty is the answer to world peace. Perhaps those of us who cannot help but move through life with technical difficulties should unite and learn to channel our strange little power.

Chew on that one the next time you can't program your DVD player.