Things That Don’t Work

I’m about to lose all patience with the machines in my life. The past few months have been a rising crescendo of everyday, but important, things not working like they’re supposed to. Behold my First World Problems:

– At work, I’m required to save all my work to a shared drive rather than my own computer. The network is so bad these days that at the end of the document’s five minutes of thinking, I usually get an error message that the filepath has been lost. Then I have to click through to the folder all over again. I draft documents for a living, so this happens about 50 times a day, which is a lot of cumulative annoyance. Especially when it could save to disk in two seconds.

– About six months ago, the cable went out in my company’s exercise room. I found a major-network show to watch on the elliptical and made peace with the situation. Last week, the TVs on the machines stopped picking up any signal at all. According to my sources, it’s unlikely that this will ever be fixed. So from now on I have to hustle in place for 40 minutes while staring at the wall. Even with music, that’s pretty lame. And sadly, I can’t read on an exercise machine – it makes me motion-sick.

– I’ve had an HTC Eris for several years. Lately it’s been sluggish and unreliable, sometimes not even registering calls. I also have to recharge it every afternoon because of bad reception in my building. It’s almost enough to make me go back to an actual telephone. I could have gone many more years without a smartphone, but my ex forced the issue (long story) and now I like and am accustomed to having one.

– My home internet doesn’t work more often than it does. Even with Comcast, that seems excessive. I’m wondering if I need a new router.

– My heating and air system broke down last night. I replaced the whole shebang so it would stop breaking down twice a year, but so far it hasn’t made any difference. I like a toasty environment, so I didn’t even notice a problem until I woke up because I was too hot. Then I realized I had never heard the compressor kick on and the fan had been running for hours. Thankfully, my HVAC guy can come by tonight. I really hope it’s something minor.

What are your current technological annoyances? Any suggestions for me?