Friday, February 18, 2022

I. Am. An. Idiot.

omg

Remember when I said that I didn’t think 2022 was going to be full of, um, triggering activities?

Well.

Surprise!

I’m a fucking idiot.

So.

I turn 47 this year. If you want to work in specifics, I will now be two years older than my mother was when she died. (She died in March, but her birthday is (was?) in May.) It’s pretty hard to wrap my head around that. Like seriously. How the fuck did I outlive my mother? I certainly don’t take care of myself, other than pretending to be a runner and pumping my body full of all kinds of (prescription) chemicals.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic… she died in 1992. The calendar is telling me we survived 2020 and 2021 and are now in 2022. You probably don’t need to be an accountant to do that math in your head…

She has been dead for thirty fucking years. THIRTY.  (And yet, she continues to live in my head rent free.)

Moving on.

While we’re talking about easy math, how about 2022 less 2001?

Yup. Dad’s been dead for 21 years this April.

Holy Jesus motherfuck.

I am not ready for these milestones.

And I thought that being married for twenty years this August was going to rock my world.

 

- - - - - - - - - -

Recently, my six year old MacBook shit the bed. The power button broke into little bitty pieces and the fan ran all the time. It would overheat. It would freeze up. It was getting pretty nerve wracking. I was never sure which laptop was going to boot up.

I ended up getting a new one for Christmas.

While moving all the software and crap was easy, hooking up all my peripherals was a bitch and a half.

I love Macs, but they are, hands down, the worst fucking piece of equipment to upgrade.

I have a Logitech wireless keyboard that I am so in love with it would be illegal. But, it’s got a USB/Bluetooth dongle thingy.

I have a great black and white laser printer, but it’s USB only.

I have a super nice HP colour laser printer that works sporadically over Wi-Fi, so that is normally connected via USB.

I have an old LaCie drive that holds all my music and photos. It’s Thunderbolt 2.

I have two HDMI monitors. One that actually connects over HDMI and one that used a Thunderbolt 2 / HDMI dongle.

The new Mac has Thunderbolt 3 ports and does not have a single USB port. (Well, technically, I guess it does, but it’s USB-C and everything is USB A? B? 2.0? 3.0? I don’t know. The “normal” USB.)

I spent a lot of time researching my options because upgrading everything to work with the new Thunderbolt 3 bullshit wasn’t going to happen.

I bought a really expensive dock. I bought HDMI to DisplayPort cords because the highly recommended dock didn’t have HDMI ports. I dropped over $250 on what could essentially be called band-aids.

Only to get it all hooked up to find out that NOTHING worked.

No monitors. No keyboard. No LaCie drive. Absolutely fucking nothing worked.

Because I’m not a total idiot, I always spend the extravagant amount for AppleCare. (I’ve really only needed it twice and both times it was a lifesaver. As my father used to say, you buy insurance hoping you never need it, but you’ll be glad you did when the world falls apart around you.)

The poor tech dude who took my call… They’re not supposed to recommend things that aren’t Apple branded or aren’t affiliated with Apple in one way or another, but I finally got him to give me a brand name.

$65 out of pocket for a dock and a little stupid USB dongle for the keyboard.

Fuck me.

Should have just called Apple before I even bought the damn computer.

(Also, I just realised that I got my first Apple Macintosh desktop computer in 1992. Right after my mother died… so I’m also celebrating thirty years of my love/hate relationship with Apple products.)

I’m fucking old.