Glitches and Malfunctions: It Would be Nice if it WORKED!

Few things take the wind out of my sails faster then putting a lot of effort into something only for part of the process to go completely wrong, and suddenly all my work appears to have been for nothing.

Earlier today, I spent several hours taking photographs of items with the intent of creating new listings on Etsy and eBay. It's something I do all the time because being an online seller is one of my major ways to make a living.

As per usual, I got to the point of offloading the photos from my camera onto my computer so I would be able to process them into a selling compatible format.

As always, I watched carefully that I selected the right items on the camera and I watched carefully as the progress bar scrolled through its ”copying 48 files to folder X” routine, followed by the usual auto delete that I employ because I just don't have room on my camera for the tens of thousands of images I go through every year.

The process finished copying the files; I looked in the destination folder and the images were there, then I unplugged the camera, opened my photo processing software… and could not find the images!

How frustrating!

Now, I should perhaps add here that whenever these things happen I am partially to blame in the sense that I'm not very good at conforming with society’s ”requirement” that I should not have anything resident on my computer and just trust everything to be on the cloud.

And it's not that I don't trust the cloud, but I don't necessarily trust the reliability of our Internet as a result of which I would rather have the images resident here on my local computer and backing up to the cloud then uploading directly to the cloud.

So, once again, you could say that the problem here is my tendency to buck convention.

Another reason for my doing things the way I do is that I would rather rely on the cloud as a place to back up the finished and processed images, rather than the huge bulk of images that I end up with in search of getting the ”just so” outcome I am looking for. If I just accepted everything being uploaded, the one terabyte of space I'm currently paying for would very quickly have been used up!

When I encounter one of these ”loss” situations, I of course have the option of just recreating everything I just worked with but most of the time I just don't have the energy to go for a redo. Or, at least not right away. Since I do need to photograph and list these items, I will be photographing them again tomorrow.

The whole incident made me think about just how much I dislike that this technology that's supposedly going to make life easier for all of us is not really doing what I'm hoping it would do.

Whereas I recognize that most of these systems are created for the mythical ”average user” I also know that I'm not one of those average users and I'm not prepared to become one of those average users just in order to be able to use certain systems that seem to be almost required of us these days.

I have encountered similar issues with my mobile phone, because I don't really use my phone the way most people do. That is, it's a phone and I use it to make phone calls, occasionally to text and otherwise just as a camera.

In that particular context the downside tends to be that I come across all these poorly designed websites — or at least what appears to me to be poorly designed — but after a while I recognized that these venues were designed purely based on having users with mobile devices, not users with something as archaic as an actual desktop computer.

Well, I'm sorry, but I'm just not going to put a bunch of effort into trying to do large scale photo processing on a smart phone screen… I need my 28 inch monitor please and thank you! My eyesight just isn't that good!

And yes, I know these are "first world problems," but I still find them annoying!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Sunday!

How about you? Do you experience frustrations with technology? How do you feel about "losing work," due to system glitches? Annoyed? Or just a natural part of modern life? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.09.01 01:33PDT
x834/2068