mixed media collage titled “THIRD DAY’S END” by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Oh wow it feels good to stretch and move around and enter back into the world of sane people…well, you know. Almost sane. What do people do all day when they don’t have to be glued at the hip to their computers? I just noticed there is sun outside today and I heard a bird. I wonder what I have missed in the past 3 days. Where were we, you and I? I have missed you.

I have just spent 3 days of my life (that I will never be able to get back), barely eating or drinking, hunched over into a tight knot, a ball-like posture where my internal organs are all jammed up on top of each other groaning, my chin is nearly touching the desktop and my knees are up into my armpits as I sit beady-eyed in front of my PC and struggle with a website issue that was marketed as being so easy and fast that “your new blankety blank art website will be up and in working order in just 15 minutes!” After a day and a half with nothing much accomplished, I decided my old art website was not so bad after all, but I persevered. It took another day and half to see the light of day. Now I am not a stupid person. So that is just wrong.

For the past 2 nights I have poured myself into bed well after 10 pm after a full day of it, hallucinating instructions and website pages, and even then unable to sleep. I am like a pitbull when this kind of stuff happens – I become so frustrated and infuriated at the counter-intuitive instructions and the stupid names attached to certain actions and tabs and sections that I want to leave my home office and fly to the place where these fools work and scream into their ears up close and personal about how SIMPLE it could all be if they didn’t feel like they had to inflate their own job description with lofty, enigmatic words and phrases in place of common words giving common instructions. Doesn’t it make you wonder if they have a clue what the website is actually supposed to do for the client? Do they understand my needs? I have NEEDS. And why can’t a task with several steps that must be made in the correct order for a procedure all be grouped on the same page so that a person does not have to go back and forth between several different pages to look stuff up in order to enter it all and get it to function?

Do I even have to mention the fiasco of OBAMACARE? Do software computer geeks live in the real world with the rest of us? Aren’t these things given a trial-run before they are released to the innocents? Everybody else has been taught to check and recheck their work before they turn it in. I keep telling myself that I could have designed it better. But I get up from my desk in total, in white-knuckled frustration, stand straight up and spin around 3 times and sit down again hoping for illumination and progress and a new perspective. The HELP option does not even address my issues. There is no live person to speak with. At the end of one of my last and most time consuming tasks, I carefully, holding my breath, click on the exact thingie I have to click on to save my newly compiled list of contacts, which had to be entered by hand (well over 2 hours just for that) into the networking support section, and in a nano-second they fly off to MARS – they are gone – never to be found again.

I scream. Neighbors think I am being injured or robbed. They call. I explain that I am just in the outer ring of computer hell. Oh, they say. Glad you’re not hurt. Been there, done that. It was last week actually. You are not alone. Just chill, step slowly away from the desk, have a drink. Take a bath and shake it all off. Try again in the morning.

I realize that all these social networking venues are critical for a person who paints, who writes, and evidently for anyone who just breathes the same air as everyone else here in the 21st century on planet earth. But I am truly sick and tired of Facebook, not yet twittering at all and don’t want to have to twitter, don’t even know what instagram is or what it’s good for, not active on Linked In, and I very seldom care – about all I do is text and email and blog and paint and eat and sleep. Is there a life remaining out there for a person like me? Or  should I just cave in to ignorance and become irrelevant?

Do you think people would still find me?

Oh and PS – I have passed my 100th blog post and hardly knew it. Whooo Hooo!