Our Nightmare Computer Story
 A few months ago we – husband and I –
decided to cohabit at last. We put our two
computers together on one shared broadband. It
seemed a sensible idea: it would free up the telephone line and give us fast email and
internet connection for the price of one monthly subscription.
There were some complications at
the start, but we were prepared for them. An electrician had to drill through walls
and ceiling to connect cabling from one floor to the next (our computers are housed on two
different levels). Result: we have a jungle of cables nestling under our respective
desks.
Then in came the computer expert
who had to grapple with the service provider, a company extremely sparing with its
information. He and we persevered because the deal
was a good one, but it meant that he’d fix the machines and they’d work for a
few days and then suddenly they’d go dead.
The expert came and went and the
cost built up. ‘Try turning off the
machine for a bit, and then turning it on,’ he said.
‘Try defragging’. (Yes, we
now know what that means.) Naturally,
everything worked for five minutes.
He put in a router which was
supposed to iron out any difficulties, but it didn’t. We made expensive calls to India and sometimes
got some useful answers, other times got nothing but despair.
Another expert had a go but the
same pattern applied: at first his magic touch worked, then it all fell apart again. Could it have been the original cabling connection? No. Perhaps the
service provider didn’t recognise my details as I was new to them? Yes for a bit, but later no. Was the computer overloaded and unable to take the
strain?
Definitely no. Was it the router? Expert
No. 1 who’d fitted it pondered for a bit and then suggested that we turn it off for a
couple of hours. Something about BT saying routers
might take time to be ‘in synch’. He
wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but worth a try.
And so it has come to pass, that this last piece
of magic worked. (As I write, I feel I am tempting
fate, but everything has been OK for about three weeks.) Oh,
but at such a price.
We probably could have bought a third computer - heaven forbid – with the money we paid out
for the privilege of shared broadband. But the other
cost was the enormous stress involved. My husband,
even tempered for most of the time, was beside himself with frustration. We both suffered the highest of anxiety for weeks. When we were on holiday, we got depressed every
time we thought of the problem we were returning to.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier,
and most of the time they do, but when they go wrong, we seem to become helpless,
floundering in waves of technology way above our heads. And
when our so-called experts flounder too, it feels as if nothing and no one can help.
The real problem is that everything’s so clever
and complicated now. Think of the instruction handbooks we have to wade through nowadays. Advanced technology has supplied us with a whole new
range of gadgets on which we learn to rely. And they
are a lot more complex than the appliances we grew up with
– the washing machines, dishwashers,
food mixers. Of course, these were the high-tech items of the past, but we were familiar with them and
could often use them intuitively, in the way the younger generation can absorb and use new
technology.
Perhaps that’s why there is some (very small)
comfort in this sorry tale: it’s the fact
that even the expert had to rely on a hit and miss method in the end.
If you have a horror story about any new gadget, you
can share it with us by emailing helen@laterlife.com
PS. Question: If you get a ‘virus alert’ email do you
a) refuse to open it?
b) immediately email all your friends?
c) check to see if it’s a hoax?
Answer: Often
these virus alerts are the equivalent of chain letters, designed to clog up emails. So c) is best.
And the websites to check on are:
http://www.breakthechain.org/
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
http://www.sophos.co.uk/
virusinfo/hoaxes
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Talkback is a regular
feature in laterlife.com run by journalist and author Helen Franks. 
