Mind versus Filter

'Technology' is certainly not the exclusive domain of computers and IT.  Here is a tale of my Saturday morning...


I headed out to my folks place to do some maintenance whilst they are away for a while.  Time to check the pool, mow the lawn and water some plants.  Only, I had been sick for the previous few days, and had a shockingly bad sleep the night before, so was not in the most enlightened mood to be doing other family members house chores.

I arrive, and the pool is green.  Mold, slime, rotting dead toads, crap everywhere.  I check the filter - and it is broken.

Frustrated, I flick a bunch of switches, nothing.  Getting more agitated, I check the cables, pushing leaves and sticks out of the way.  My arms are flailing, and I am getting hot and annoyed.  I really dont want to be doing this right now - the wind is blowing around me and my hair is flying in my face.

"I'm going to be stuck here all day now.  Dad is going to be pissed.  I am feeling like death.  This filter is a piece of crap."

Nothing that I try works, so I give up, go inside and email my Dad with the news to get his opinion on what to do.  Deflated, I get ready to leave.

After a few minutes though, I calm down and do some thinking.  A realisation of stinking hypocrisy dawns on me - I have just fallen into the mind-trap of frustration that can so easily block positive thought and conducive problem solving.  In fact, I was in this mind set even before I arrived at my folks house, using tiredness and illness as my cloak, which really gave me no chance of ever having a good interaction with this troublesome filter.  I also realise that if I was trying to fix this filter as part of my work, I would have approached it very differently, with much more quality and presence, regardless of tiredness or not feeling well.

So, I reset my expectations and decide to give it another go.  I calmly step outside and move towards the filter.  It sits there, intent on fooling me, willing to send me home without success.  But I have a weapon.  My level-headedness shall prevail.

The main street empties, a tumbleweed rolls across our path.  I take another step.  The wind blows the nearby leaves into a flutter.

I arrive at the filter, and calmly run through a process of elimination.  After 2 minutes, I isolate a $5 powerboard as being broken, run the filter cable directly into the power socket, and up she springs.

Fixed.  I leave the house with the filter issue resolved and the green pool on its way back to blue health.

Later it dawned on my that even if I had not found the issue (i.e, if the issue was something I could not solve at that time for example a blow motor), I still would have felt better after the second round of problem solving, knowing that I had approached it in the right way and had moved to negate my earlier frustrated response.  The anger and frustration blocked my abilities to think clearly, but with some awareness and resolve, I was able to change my response and work through the tiredness/sickness/hotness back to a place where I was much more likely to have a positive interaction.

Technology and Me

This is not what I do.  That is, I'm not a professional blog writer.  This is not a commercial pursuit, an undertaking that puts food on the table or petrol in the car.  This is an expression of thought, and hopefully at times, knowledge.

I fix people's computer problems.  That is what I do.  I could even broaden that to say "I fix people's technology problems".  Computer technician.  Support dude. Technology consultant.  The IT guy.  Nerd.

That is me.  Every family has one - every business needs one [or possibly quite a few] - and increasingly, our personal lives could benefit from one also.

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We all have a relationship with technology.  This relationship changes frequently, morphing like the desert sand-hills, (and sometimes oscillating wildly, moment to moment like some sort of wild, oscillating device) but my experience has shown at any given instant this relationship of humans with tech can be slotted into one of four main categories.
 

Need, want, love and hate.
 

Need
 

You cannot escape it.  Communication, business, entertainment, transport, medical.  It surrounds us, engulfs us.  We all need technology at some point.
 

Want
 

That slightly slimmer, slightly faster, slightly cooler and slightly more expensive phone/laptop/camera/gadget has just been released.  Want one. Bad.
 

Love
 

“What, there’s an app that lets me “insert verb describing previously annoying or laborious task made easier by simple piece of software” on my phone?" Life now complete. Love that.
 

Hate
 

“This computer doesn’t fucking work”.
 

“My phone is fucked”.
 

 “How the fuck do I “insert task that should be impossibly easy but always seems impossibly hard”.
 

“I hate Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Apple/any or all other tech companies that are seemingly out to destroy life's simplicity and beauty with their ugly, ugly technology."
 

 “How the fuck do I archive my emails.”
 

"I hate printers".

 
This is generally where the IT guys comes in .  The hate category.

Sometimes we get called in at the need stage, but the very nature of a need decries an item or process or solution that is not necessarily wanted.  Therefore this category has a very close, almost symbiotic relationship with the hate category.  This is something us techs learn early - need is a slippery slope to hate.

If we are very lucky, we can sometimes be involved in the want.  Want almost requires a smidgen of love in order to exist - these two have a close relationship, but it would be a stretch to say they share the same symbiotic connection as need and hate.  No, want (or craving) and love (or lust) are connected but can still be somewhat exclusive.

On even rarer occasions, a technician/techie/IT guy will find themselves thrust into the love category.   This is the holy grail of IT support - love.  At this point, people almost irrationally heap as much love on the tech themselves rather than the technology they have really developed the crush for.  But we will take anything we can get.

But sadly, it is hate were we languish for most of our days.  If not for peoples hate, whether their hate of technology, or a hate of wanting to learn a purposeful way or approaching it, we would not be technicians.

It would be easy of us to hate the hate.  We are always there, it is not always fun.

But this blog aims to show a love of the hate is possible.  People hate.  And rage.  And swear.  And get frustrated.  But the job of a technician, a good technician that is, is to first and foremost remain calm.  In my book, fixing a specific problem for someone still comes a huge second place to remaining calm, aware and zen-like during the process of that fixing.

In fact, as we will discover on the pages of this blog, the two (fixing problems and remaining calm) are more related than many suspect...