Technology and Me: A Horror Story

I have a bizarre relationship with technology: it sometimes scares me. Everytime something goes wrong with my laptop or the TV or my digital camera or the clasp which keeps my sock cabinet closed, I panic. I worry that if I try to fix it, it will just get worse. To make anything work these days, you have to be a bloody electrical engineer. It's as if everyone should have a permenant IT team from India living in their apartment.

For example, my partner Jerry bought me a Sony Blu Ray player for Christmas. The whole point was so that we could stream Netflix live to our TV in Jackson Heights, Queens. Since the gift was mine, I volunteered to hook it up. Mistake. Well, the hooking up to the TV was not very difficult. We bought an HDMI cable and all you had to do was attach it to the TV and the Player. That was the easy part. Getting it hooked up to the Internet was the nightmare. It turns out you need a LAN adaptor--whatever that is--to get the internet. Best Buy and all the other chains were out of the LAN adaptor SONY made. Evidently there was a big rush after Christmas. At Walmart, they recommended something called the Netgear Universal Adaptor which supposedly works with every brand. The directions said you had to detach your router from your computer and hook up this universal adaptor to it to program it. I was frightened that if I removed the internet connection from the router, it would be lost and I would have spend 127 hours on the phone to India and I'd have to cut my own arm off like James Franco to get it to work again.

Fortunatley, I got it to work and everything turned out OK. But Netflix does not yet have its entire enormous inventory available for direct streaming to your TV. It did have Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I'm also having problems with my Nikon Coolpix digital camera--I think it's the one that Ashton Kutcher does the commercials for. The outdoor shots come out fine, but as you may have noticed in some of my previous blog posts, the interior shots are kinda blurry. Do I have it on the wrong setting, I wonder? I thought all these point and shoot jobs gave marvelous pictures for even idiots like me. I had a Canon that worked very well, but it got banged up and the screen where you see the shots went black. Jerry is going to lend me his camera so I can see if it's better than the Nikon. Moral for me and Bruce Willis: Don't trust Ashton Kutcher.