Rant #3,851: Frustration

Technology is wonderful when it works--

But when it doesn't, the user is in trouble.

And that user was me yesterday.

I don't know if you had this problem, but Yahoo Mail was down for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon.

I had no trouble getting it on my phone, but on my computer, it kept telling me that my mail was not available, and that I should try again--

Which i ended up doing, to no avail, several times.

For remote workers, email is the link between you and your employer.

Yes, I do use other mail programs than Yahoo Mail, but on my main, desktop computer, where I do all of my writing and editing, a properly running email is essential, and I--and presumably others--didn't have that tool for the better part of the afterrnoon.

I went on a tutorial to try to find out what the problem was, but it wasn't helpful.

After intermittently going back and forth trying to get into my email, I tried one last time at about 4:45; p.m., and lo and behold, it was seemingly back to normal.

Maybe Yahoo was doing work on their email, but if that was the case, they should have alerted users beforehand to this situation.

Instead, they left us high and dry, and it wasn't a good feeling--

Especially when my scanner was not working correctly.

For some reason, the scanner would not scan images in color.

I never experienced such a problem before, and faced with this dilemma, I did everything I could think of to rectify the problem.

I unplugged the scanner, and then replugged it back in to reboot it--

I reloaded the scanner program, and then several other scanner programs with both newer and older variations of the program I already use--

I checked online to see if others had experienced the same problem--

But no matter what I did, I could not get the scanner to scan in color.

After about two solid hours of trying to figure this out in between my frustrations with my non-working email, I got a brainstorm at about the same time that I got my email back--

Which was to change the source that was listed in the on-screen scanner program.

I had no idea what it had been before, but at first I changed it to "color" which did not work--

But in a true scanner Hail Mary, I tried "color text"--and it worked!

So on my last try, I hit the bullseye, and boy, after two hours of frustration, I think I figured it all out.

I have absolutely no idea how this area got out of whack, but i must have, unknowingly, touched something that eventually threw everything into chaos.

So as of the moment, everything looks to be working correctly, and I will certainly test both of them later today to make sure I am right about that.

Technology is great, but it can also be very frustrating.

Anyone for snail mail and mimeograph machines?