Have you ever had a day when all your technology seems to fail you and you are afraid to try something else, get on another device, or just want to say screw it and go watch television. I have those days occasionally and based on conversations, I am not the only one. You really have to question the why of this. Maybe it is Karma. Maybe it’s the way the stars are in alignment, maybe it is the law of attraction, or maybe you just got up on the wrong side of the bed. It could be ghosts or maybe just coincidence. Maybe it is that the frustration you are enduring causes you to hit the wrong key. Who knows? It happens.

Several weeks ago my internet speed was incredibly slow. I did a speed test and it verified that it was much slower than acceptable. Since I had been dealing with this off and on over the past couple of months I put a call into the internet provider. Of course they tried to fix it on line and I was even told that I had too many icons on my screen and that was causing the slow speed. I finally convinced them to come out and discovered that when the DSL was installed it was not “capped off” properly—up the street—and that was causing the problem. I am not sure what that meant, but it seemed reasonable and the internet speed was back to normal.

At the same time my DIRECTV system would not communicate recorded shows throughout the house. After resetting several times, I called DIRECTV and agreed to have a technician come out and look into the situation. He discovered that a board on the outside of the house needed to be replaced. A few days later I had a similar problem and called again. This time they really did not redo anything, reset the machines and everything has worked properly since. Now why did this happen at the same time as the internet speed?

The third thing was when I got the internet speed running my printer failed to work. No reason why. After several attempts to reset and restart, it began to work. Again—why? Why at the same time as the other issues?

Last night I was responding to a business email and was called to look at the television in the master bedroom. It appeared that the DTV box was receiving the remote signal, but the television was not turning on. After 30 minutes of trying to get the television to work I gave up. Then I went back to my email and my computer was frozen. The only way I could get it to respond was to power off. When powering back up—it took an extended period of time—way too long—it eventually came back on. Then I noticed that my anti-virus icon, that I renewed last week, had a red X on it. Knowing this might be inviting trouble, I clicked on the icon and got a message that the anti-virus software could not verify my subscription and gave me instructions on downloading a program to reinstall that SHOULD start automatically. I followed the instructions, and as expected, it took an extraordinary amount of time to uninstall and reinstall. When I finally got to the end, guess what—it did not work and I received another error message to do a manual download. I gave up. Evidently the technology gods were against me and I decided I probably was not going to get it to work for a while, so I went to bed.

This morning the television is still not working and I will tackle the anti-virus when I get home. Why oh why does this happen all at once? I guess it would be different if I was a geek or technology maven. I am not. I know enough to get me into trouble, but not enough to always get me out of it.

How many of you have days like these? How many of you get technologically challenged all at the same time? Do you have an explanation?