SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

So as many of you may have noticed, last week this site went a bit nuts (by nuts I mean, not functional), especially for those of you who use Internet Explorer. We sincerely apologize, and many thanks to all of you who wrote in to let us know. In the future, any tech problem you may be experiencing, do not hesitate to email info@selfabsorbed.me (specifying what browser you’re using) so we can trouble shoot it as quickly as possible. As you might have imagined, we are *not* that technically competent so the sooner we know, the sooner we can get our resident (yet busy) tech genius on the problem.

What’s interesting about technology and technical difficulties in general is how utterly dependant we are on technology to work (all the time, no exceptions) and are downright flabbergasted when it doesn’t. When I go to Twitter and get the happy whale announcing ‘too many tweets, try back later’ message, I look out the window to make sure a flaming meteor isn’t approaching earth because it just seems too incomprehensible that their site wouldn’t be working seamlessly. Same thing when Facebook stalls in loading photos during my ‘stalk people’ sessions or my highly dangerous addiction, online game Bejeweled Blitz, accidently does not register or remember my latest high score. Technology failing is a surefire way to get me enraged. It’s a robot! Computers don’t even have deal with dating, dressing themselves or the chaos of taking the subway on a daily basis. I manage to function, so it definitely should.

Upon further examination, it becomes obvious that most technical devices are as flaky as the rest of us. At least I only crash once at the end of the day…Firefox crashes anytime I’ve had it open for four hours using ten tabs, usually when I’m right in the middle of a suspenseful and intriguing gChat with someone. So if it’s any consolation for last week’s breakdown, here are a few of my own technical disaster stories.

1. Think technology makes sense? Then explain why I once lived in an apartment allergic to DVD players. Yes, no joke, every DVD player brought into the apartment died a slow, painful, scratchy death. The device would work for 3 – 6 weeks, then promptly stop reading DVDs all together or start mangling them. At first we thought it was because we were using the ghetto JWinn Chinese brand that my roommate’s mother purchased in a Korean back alley, but by DVD player number 3 we’d upgraded to Best Buy Sony and suffered the same result. When we moved out, we had 4 DVD players stacked on top of one another under our TV, all malfunctioning.

2. Despite the fact that I work in technologically advanced sector of the creative industry with a lot of programmers, our office’s video conference system (which I’ve ranted about before) only works about 12% of the time. This makes meetings like pulling teeth. How is it possible for a device to so rarely work? If it were an employee, it would have been fired 6 months ago. No one touches its settings, yet the camera system manages to act like an erratic screwball on hallucinogenics. I personally am convinced that our camera is hooked up to a parallel universe, which explains a. the irrationality, b. why the mike is shaped like a flying saucer and c. why people often sound like the Terminator gurgling under water on the other line. It’s just our alien friends trying to contact us.

3. Wi-Fi. Perhaps the most irrational of all the technologies. One day you have it, the next, you don’t, even if it’s your own password protected system! So when I moved, I decided not to get an internet connection since even when I paid for my own it required multiple rebootings a week to function. Accepting that the service is undependable and worthless regardless of whether you pay, you might as well not bother purchasing for it. Luckily, a Wi-Fi network in my near vicinity called ‘Hobo Camp Bitches’ provides me with erratic Wi-Fi about 60% of the time, alternating between full-functionality and complete disappearance of the network all together month-by-month. Explain that.

4. Lastly, there’s my keyboard, in which different keys sometimes randomly, with no warning, just stop functioning or require severe extra pressure. Usually just for an hour or two, then they return to normal.

?!?!

It’s especially dangerous when this happens to my CTRL key when copying and pasting (CTRL C and V). For example, when I decided it to try out my new professional camera lenses by taking artistic nudes of the guy I was dating, uploaded the album to share with him, and then sent that link to my entire department at work since the CTRL V of the link to my presentation I’d copied after emailing him didn’t stick. Luckily, being the paranoid crazy that I am, I had password protected the album so my co-workers were just prompted the album login screen.

There’s a lesson here folks: Password protect your online albums if there’s anything the slightest bit risqué! Technology, contrary to popular belief, IS out to get us.