Tuesday, February 19, 2013

DEFINING MASOCHISM

A few months ago I bought an iPad.  In today's world, anything bought that is manufactured requires a significant learning curve.  Having used PCs since the early I was told it is very intuitive.  I'm apparently missing that gene.

The manual I bought was far too long to be read cover to cover since my boredom reader is far below a few pages of learning things that I am not going to immediately and repetitively use.  But the iPad is just a small portion of the learning curve I'm riding on.  Having a laptop (PC) for a few years that came with Vista on it, i would have left this life cursing the designers who coded that system. 
Aside from being a resource hog, my life was spent saying 'Yes' to the stupid machine, letting it know that it wa okay to download something, okay to change the registry (which has to be changed if you are installing a program and is a given), the okay that you meant the other okays.  I had a new operating system (WIN 7) put on.  Dis early DOS, I was able to move up in operating systems and in a very short time I knew the changes and had been able to digest them all.  WIN 7 is probably a good operating system but it is analogous  to learning a new foreign language.

Today I bought (simply because the mother board decided to go to Heaven) an iMac, 27", with lots of space, an external drive for back up and external CD/DVD drive.  It is a lovely feeling to master any of the commands but there are so many of them!  Of course these are only a few of the things to learn.  A Keurig is easy to use but it has a computer and you must learn how to set that up.  It also requires reading the maintenance instructions.  When it starts barely dribbling coffee out and what used to be a full cup is now a portion, it is time to take the water out of the well, fill it with white cider vinegar, , and make several cups of vinegar in a cup.  This gets rid of  the deposit of minerals on those little tubes in
there.

And so life goes on daily.  I wonder where all that free time I used to squeeze into my life went.  Who am I kidding?  I never had free time.  My masochistic life was only possible by living with constant sleep deprivation.    'Retirement' hasn't changed a thing.  The time is filled with things to be learned and things  be repaired, cleaned, renewed, replaced, carried up or down, sorted, polished, sent, wrapped, and even eaten.  That list barely scratches the surface.

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