“What did you Do?”

“I have never seen that screen before.”

“Don’t touch anything!”

I joke,  “if you look up ‘Late Adopter’ in Wikipedia, you’ll find a picture of me.”

When I bail from the phone tree screaming “REPRESENTATIVE!” and then hold for a real human CSR for fifteen minutes, and she finally comes on and says, “Oh, could you hold on for a minute, my system just went down,” I joke, “Computers save us time. Right?”

I don’t say, “Oh,  don’t worry. It’s me. Computers hate me.”

But I think that might be true.

It isn’t just computers, it’s the scanner-printer on my desk that turns on in the middle of the night and shuts down when I scan and then try to print. It’s the smart TV that is smarter than I am. It’s the new dishwasher that I keep inadvertently turning on.

My wife says, “It’s definitely you. These things happen to everyone, but with nowhere near the frequency that they happen to you. It’s like you have a  energy field around you that disrupts electronics.” Am I a walking electrostatic generator?

I feel like a combination between two cartoon characters:

• Joe Btfsplk – from Al Capp’s “Li’l’ Abner” cartoon strip. Joe walked around with a dark cloud over his head, and wherever he went, he brought bad luck. Cars crashed, buildings fell down, and painters dropped buckets of paint on people.
• Mister Myxzptlk – the imp from the fifth dimension in the old DC comic series Superman, Mister Myxzptlk was originally drawn by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, but keeps showing up as a villain in other Superman productions. Myxzptlk is a prankster, who because he is from another dimension can warp space-time in this one creating chaos.

Joe was a hapless jinx. Myxzptlk’s chaos is intentional; he uses shifts in energy, that are often drawn as lightning bolts or magnetic concentric circles. Maybe that’s what I do.

I have written about this problem before.

In 1994, when I first started puzzling about it, . I wrote a piece called the Journey of the Late Adopter. I just thought I was a garden variety technology laggard. I thought that was an outgrowth of my birth to an old technology father, printer, and a new technology mother, who became a computer programmer in 1956. My father’s job setting type for a newspaper was replaced by computer typesetting.

In 2016, I revisited this idea, marveling at the progress I’d made. I wrote My Adventures with Computers Installment 2, wherein I hypothesized,

“Perhaps computers remembered when I made my mother cry by making paper airplanes out of six months’ worth of punch cards.”

I have now stopped anthropomorphizing computers, giving them ill intent, or assigning retribution motives to them.

In 2023, I related the latest battle in my war with computers, in “Do Computers Hate Me”. I related how I shut down the entire computer system at my local CVS simply by touching the “send email receipt” button.

The problem pesists

It has become clear that it is me. And it is not just computers; it’s all electronics, anything through which  an electric impulse passes, especially if there is a silicon chip involved.

In the last three years, I’ve had skirmishes with smoke detectors, FireStik, streaming services, LED lamps, dimmers, microphones, cameras, various appliances, all of our remotes, and online ordering from a variety of vendors.

I’d had some minor technical glitches with Mailchimp, the email provider for this blog, so when the web designer for my author site suggested I switch to MailerLite, I followed her advice.

MailerLite’s system has an intermittent glitch. Sometimes it double mails the previous week’s blog because it doesn’t recognize that a more recent blog has been posted. Some weeks everything works as it’s suppose to. Then it doesn’t.

Tech support just LOVES intermittent problems. They have been working on it for a month now and two weeks everything was fine, and two weeks not.

Of course, getting to MailerLite tech support means I have to go through LiteBot, the MailerLite AI CSR. Arrrgh.

LiteBot is oh so pleasant, and really tries to be helpful,

“Have you tried______,  or_____,  or_______ , or_______?”

“OK LiteBot

Thank you for demonstrating that you are more technically competent than your customer or your tech team. You are rapidly proving that MailerLite doesn’t deserve this human’s business.

Alan”

I have a workaround. When MailerLite picks up the wrong post, I do another mailing with the right one. This unnecessary bombardment sometimes causes a subscriber or two to unsubscribe, so if it happened this time I’m really working on it or as ML tech support recently told me:

“We truly value your business and want to assure you that we will have this issue resolved soon.”

Recently, I’ve also had problems with my universal booklink, which I thought was resolved but apparently takes some  customers to a screen that looks like this:

I don’t see this screen when I click on the link. Neither does Billie, nor my kids, but if there is one person there are more. Arrrgh!

The provider is working on it. Tech support just LOVES intermittent problems.

I can do a workaround. I am getting good at workarounds for technical problems. Recently  I became aware that in my main Outlook email my sent items were vanishing. It took me over a month to notice.

I called Microsoft support, for which I pay $99 annually  and was told they couldn’t do anything because I was using Office 2019, which was no longer supported. I upgraded ($280.) and the problem persisted and was told “not our problem; it’s your hosting service.”

“Nope, said the hosting service. “That goes through Google Workspace.”

Does anyone know how to get support from Google for anything other than ads?

I don’t think so.

I’ll spare you the many back and forth iterations here.

So I did all the things suggested on searches, followed YouTube videos, and came up dry.

I couldn’t understand why my other email had no problems. No tech help I talked to had any idea.

In the interim I discovered that the sent mail vanishing wasn’t instantaneous. Mysteriously, around five hours after posting, these emails disappeared from the Sent folder and ended up in Trash. I looked for settings, changed everything, restarted, and the problem persisted.

I backed up the data and reloaded Outlook, still no joy.

I gave up. I used the Trash folder as my sent mail folder. I was just careful when I permanently deleted emails not to delete the sent emails I wanted to hang onto.

Then last week, I was on my iPhone. I noticed that the sent emails there had a little icon next to them.

“Hmmm, I wonder what that is.” This symbol didn’t show up in Outlook on my computer.

I highlighted it on the iPhone. It referred me to settings. I Googled it on my computer. I tried other browsers. No clue.

Eventually I searched on my phone using Safari. It told me this icon indicated a blocked phone number.
“Wait what? These are emails.”

I looked at blocked call numbers in the iPhone settings. I get a lot of spam and scams, so I block a lot of calls.

I scrolled down through the very long list of numbers and there at the bottom was my email address.

These days my most persistent spam are book marketing scammers.  Blocking them is all-consuming. Some scammers have somehow circumvented my spam blocker by making it look like their email comes from my email address.

Evidently, I blocked one of those emails from my iPhone.

I unblocked my email address and all the icons disappeared. I moved all the sent emails from the Trash folder back into the Sent folder. I fully expected that they would migrate back to Trash in five hours as they had done many times before.

A miracle happened. They stayed in the Sent folder.

So, it’s me. Computers may not hate me. I may be an electronics Btfsplk-Myxzptlk, or maybe just a P.I.C.N.I.C, which, as my stepdaughter explained to me, is tech support-ese for:

Problem In Chair Not In Computer.