Wednesday, March 30, 2005

I hate feeling stupid, it makes me feel like an idiot!

I've always thought that I'm a reasonably intelligent person. There are certain areas where I lack smarts. Math is definitely one of those areas. My youngest son is an accountant and the controller of the company he works for at the age of 24. I have no idea where he gets that from but he amazes me.

The current frustration in my life at the moment though is the computer. My email is through Microsoft Outlook. Being a very responsible computer owner, I have spam killers, virsus scans, firewalls, all kinds of things. Every so often a message will pop up asking if I want to grant access. I usually hit no. I did this several weeks ago and within days could no longer use my Outlook. It seems I have denied access to myself. I went emailless for a few days and then called the provider we use for the internet. I have a friend who does on-line internet support for a US company and she has remarked that it's really the luck of the draw as to how much the person on the other end of the tech lines knows as to how much help you will get. I must have got THE ROOKIE my first call. He couldn't help me at all. I let it go for another week (I needed that rest period) before I tried it again. This time I got someone who knew what he was doing. Unfortunately I didn't. He kept telling me to go here and go there and I couldn't keep up with him. By the time the phone call winded down I apoligized for being so clueless and taking up so much of his time - I know they are timed on these things. I hate feeling stupid. And I still can't get into my email through Outlook. It's going to take a call to another tech person. I shudder at the thought.
While I was on a roll from that fiasco, I decided to try and fix up this blog and make it a better place to visit. I see other blogs and they are so darned good looking. I thought I would start off small and add links to other blogs. That should be easy right??? HA! Maili is very kindly helping me with it, but I'm making a mess. A complete and utter mess. It's the king of all knotted wool balls. I'm getting so frustrated, I want to take my keyboard and ......... well something.
This reminds me of when I was in grade nine, so many many years ago. Computers were just starting to come into being. This was WAY before the days of PC's. You typed your computer orders on these brown punch cards that were later used as Christmas wreaths. Anyone else remember those? They went kachinging through the mainframe and if you had the slightest little error, nothing happened. I had this little Japanesse teacher who was shorter than me and I'm only 5'2. He spoke with a heavy accent that I had a hard time understanding. Between not understanding what he was saying and not knowing what I was doing, I ended up with a 27/100 mark in that class and I think 26 of those were pity marks. That was the lowest mark I EVER got and traumatized me from computers for many (many) years.
I'm starting to feel the same frustration right about now that I did with the little Japanesse teacher and my mark of 27.
I hate feeling like and idiot, it makes me feel stupid.
On the brighter side, Lost is on in about 10 minutes.