Last Friday, I was knee-deep in a lengthy to-do list. Grocery shopping, gift shopping, bathroom cleaning, bank, post office, yes, even cleaning our pet lizard’s tank, etc etc, the list goes on. (I’m either incredibly efficient at errands or a terrible procrastinator… I’ll let you pick!) While I was downtown, I decided to take a mini detour and finally visit the Verizon Store to get my phone checked out. What’s one more stop when you’re already spending an entire day on errands?
My cell phone (pocket computer!) has been having some problems that have been nagging at me, but none of them were serious enough to ACTUALLY do something. I’m sure you can relate!
The audio was muffled sometimes, but not all the time. I could fix it by having headphones available, which I managed to do approx 80% of the time.
My Contact List wasn’t searching properly, but the right names still came up if I searched texting app, so I adapted.
My valiant screen protector had been holding it together for more than a year, but was getting to be cracked beyond reasonable use. It made the screen less responsive and made me feel icky when I saw how broken it had become. Blech!
If I had taken my own advice, I would have thought, “tech problems are fixable! I should fix them ASAP so they don’t drain my energy, and then I can get the benefits of having tech that actually works.” Of course, I didn’t! I let myself be inconvenienced, made excuses, procrastinated, felt hopeless, convinced myself I probably needed to replace my phone, procrastinated EVEN MORE, and never prioritized dragging my sorry butt the store to figure out what was going on. I let myself get to a place of utter stuck-ness and under-the-surface frustration/hopelessness. Yep, it even happens to me!
I’m sure you can imagine my sense of relief when I walked out of there having solved all three problems! Muffled audio? Simply clean speakers with some alcohol and canned air. Unsearchable contacts? Make sure you haven’t filtered your contacts down to a “group.” (A group? I didn’t even think to check that because I don’t use groups!). Broken screen protector? Replaceable! 1, 2, 3, presto chango! 5 minutes and $40 later, I had a “new lease” on my phone, with the same old lease paying for it.
This post is an invitation for you to ACTUALLY get to the bottom of a tech problem in your life! Monitor blurry? Fix the resolution and wipe it down with a rag. Cord broken? Stop reading right now and order a new one. Procrastinating on a spreadsheet problem? Write me a damn email! You are 100% capable and competent at fixing tech problems if you only gave yourself the chance. Seriously, before the school year starts again, I beg you to fix something in your tech environment. If you can’t right now, schedule an hour in your calendar for the next two weeks.
There’s plenty more to say but… I should really *actually* restart my computer after it downloaded the latest updates (I’ve been snoozing the notification for the last few days… oops). Keeping my laptop up to date will help me have a secure work environment and stop getting annoying and distracting pop-up reminders. Updating is inevitable, so I can either procrastinate or get it out of the way today. This is what I mean by #digitalselfcare – taking small steps regularly to improve my experience with technology, which is how I spend more than half of my waking hours! The Data Are Alright can wait 5 minutes while I exit out of some windows. On that note, cheers!
One thought on “digital self care vol iv”