Little things defeat me. An electrical blip — so brief as to go otherwise unnoticed — knocked out the time and date on the clocks and telephones in my house. It was so brief I didn’t realize it had happened until I went to bed and everything was blinking. Don’t you hate when that happens?
All our computers are laptops, so we didn’t notice. They all just switched to batteries, so when the glitch ended, everything seemed fine.
Until I got to the bedroom and everything was blinking, each in its own color. Resetting the clock radio was easy, but then there was a telephone. They are all linked, so I only have to set one and all three should automatically reset. It should have been no big deal. But it was.
I was defeated by an AT&T multi-handset system I installed in our home a few years ago. Never had it lost its time, even during a much longer outage. This time, it lost everything including all its settings and sub-settings. All blown away.
Every time something minuscule defeats me, I am reminded how helpless I am — we all are — in the face of our technology. Even those of us who are technologically savvy have limits. All of us have technical Waterloos. If anything goes awry with any major system in my house, not only am I helpless, so is everyone else who lives here. Three generations of people who use technology constantly and depend on it. If we were without power for 24 hours our world would collapse.
It’s the huge, soft, pink, underbelly of our modern world. The aliens will not have to defeat us in battle. They just have to knock out our communication satellites and blow up a few power plants. Human civilization goes down like a row of dominoes.
The only survivors will be those who don’t depend on technology. Or maybe the survivalists in their compounds. Their lives will go on as before. Not me, though. Probably not you either.
Given what’s been going on these past few months, I think a long power outage might finish me off. I’m already derailed, but one more hit and I’m over the cliff.
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Categories: Entertainment, Marilyn Armstrong, Personal, Technology
Serendipity Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth 
It’s disturbing how much society relies on power. My garage door is an electric one, so if inside the garage when the power went awry, I’d be stuck ‘in’ there (I can manually open it of course, but then it’s unlocked. That’s scarier to me than being stuck “inside”). I’m with you about the de-railed comment though. One more good push and many a train will fall. Permanently.
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I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of the cliff. I’m not even scared, just worn out. I’ve been trying to fight “the evil” my whole life and this is where I’ve wound up. How did that happen?
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Our phones re-set to the correct time after a power cut. And PLEASE do get a power surge protecting device attached right at the wall socket. This should give you some leeway in case of massive bouts of power flow. I stopped breathing when I saw your multi-multi-multiple devices salad right next to your handbag. Sure means of setting the house on fire. Now I also fear for your lives regarding your electrical engineering….. Please protect yourselves and your all important tech stuff…. We really wd be lost if we were suddenly off the grid!
On a diff. note: A friend is going off her social medias and at the same time does her fasting (Ramadam) – I think that is a good thing too. (I am not on fb and only look into Twitter about once a month, I am inactive on IG so I’m a good one to talk….) The only thing I’d miss would be the blogs I follow)
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You don’t know the half of it. They did some really bad wiring in this house when it was built. We’ve had the circuit board replace three times (one of our friends is an electrician), but anything more would mean literally ripping out all the walls and rewiring insides. I’ve also moved a lot of stuff around and a lot of those things were chargers, so they are not functional most of the time. All intermittent stuff. But this house does absolutely have some serious electric issues.
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NOW I’m seriously worried …..
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Oh, those short “brownouts” are so annoying. I don’t have such a lot of things to fix, the clock of course. I don’t bother to set the time on the microwave anymore. I hadn’t even thought about the phone. I don’t think you need to set the time on it. Would it be worth buying an Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to plug the phones into? They might prevent them from going off in those short term glitches.
Mobile phones are my tech Waterloo. I only just figured out how to answer a call with my current handset. I kept pressing the green phone icon and could not work out why nothing was happening. Eventually resorted to looking at the online manual and discovered that you are supposed to glide your finger across it. Whose stupid idea was that? I have never figured out how to use call holding either.
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Made me laugh…. took me a few trial and error handlings too before I got the sliding finger thingie. Just shows that we can still learn new skills!
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I had a UPS years ago, It was expensive and I don’t know what became of it. i think it vanished when we moved here. I need a new one.
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I don’t have one either and I should. They may be cheaper now.
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Let me just say that any of us using digital cameras, cell phones, tablets, computers, and the like, will be at a loss if we lose power and can’t charge the batteries we depend on. I’m looking into one of those solar chargers the will charge batteries and my laptop computer. Yeah I know, it’s just another piece of tech.
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Maybe a power outage wouldn’t be so bad. It might be nice to go “off-grid” for a while.
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