I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not very good with technology. I can turn on my computer and use the programs… most of them… ok, some of them, but much more than that and I’m lost.

My kids are the IT department of my house and will probably run their own technology firm some day, if they don’t secretly have one already. I’m not kidding, my kids know more about my computer and phone than I do!

Blue screen of death… “Kids, mommy needs you!”

Phone screen freezes… “Kids, mommy needs you!”

iPad tells me it hasn’t been backed up in 18 weeks… “Kids, mommy needs you!”

When I was their age, we didn’t have a home computer, much less portable tablets. Phones, well there was no such thing as a cell phone back then. Our phones were still tethered to the wall with a coiled cord. If you wanted privacy you pulled the phone as far from the kitchen as you could, stretching the cord till you could almost hear it cry. More often than not you found yourself sitting in a closet, your head on the floor next to the phone as you tried to whisper loud enough that your friends would still hear you. The day I got my own bedroom phone… a bright yellow Pac-man phone… WAS AMAZING!!! It was like my parents had handed me the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. 

I never dreamed of carrying a pocket-sized phone around with me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my cell phone. Cell phones are cool. I am constantly connected… phone calls, emails, internet searches, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, blah blah blah, INSERT NEXT NEW APP HERE!!! WE ARE ALWAYS CONNECTED…

But seriously, cell phones are great for safety. I love that my kids have them and can reach me whenever they need to… but love it more when they want to. With all that said, I’m sure my next statement is of the unpopular brand… I think cell phones have killed childhood. OK… that’s a topic for another post. 

The whole point of my post ‘I think my computer hates me’ was to say this:

I often feel like my computer deliberately deletes my files! There, I’ve said it. My computer deliverately deletes my files! What is that? What did I do to my computer to make it hate me so much? I backup everything… I have thumb-drives (do people still call them thumb-drives or is it flash-drives now?) for all my work and I keep a downloaded backup (multiple in fact) of everything I do. Yet, the other day, after discovering that 5 of my 7 eBooks had somehow mysteriously disappeared from Amazon, I tried to find the files on my computer and THEY WERE GONE!

Shock!

Fear!!

Terror!!!

To say that I was freaking out would be putting it nicely. Luckily I found a way to get the files… but my computer didn’t make it easy… the files weren’t formatted.

NO FORMATTING AT ALL!

Paragraphs and chapters ran into each other like one long run on. How does something like this happen? I tried everything, but in the end I ended up spending hours re-formatting one book… I have four more to do… FOUR MORE! 

I’ll look on the bright side… I haven’t read those books in a while, so at least I get to reconnect with some of my past characters. I have missed them.

Has something like this ever happened to you? If so, tell me your story and what you did to fix it. Misery loves company, right?