Rage of the Machines

Technology has made this past week for me a bad one.

On Sunday I drove in my Volkswagen to, of all places, a VW show in Connecticut. Two-thirds of the way there the "check engine" light came on. The engine started bucking and resisting acceleration. I made it to the Volkswagen show and back to New Jersey, but the problem was an ignition coil that cost over five hundred dollars to fix.

I spent Tuesday morning waiting for the repair and missed my regular writers' group meeting. I drove off after the dealership fixed it, and the "check engine" light came back on. I turned around and went back, and they fixed the errant spark plug that caused the problem.

I spent part of Wednesday afternoon printing handouts for a blogging workshop I was to give for my writers' group on Thursday, and I had a little trouble with the printer - and a lot of trouble collating the pages manually. A job that should have taken one hour at the most took more than two.

Thursday I gave my blogging workshop. But there was a major problem - the laptop I was using wouldn't connect to Blogger.com or any of my blogs, except one. I could connect to any other Internet site, but not Blogger.com or most Blogger-based sites. I spent the night talking about what I do rather than showing anyone. And the bad connection to Blogger was due to a bad laptop, not Blogger; I went home and signed onto Blogger on my own PC without a problem.

Tonight I had to start my computer four times because my Windows picture file kept failing to respond.

Welcome to the machine. :-O