BLOG # 16 "OH YE OF LITTLE FAITH"

OH ye of little faith “ This is what I said to myself as I listened to one more lecture given to me by my daughter on the infallibility of computers. The lecture came about because of the difficulty I had posting my third blog- the first one I did without assistance. I had finished writing it and was all set to post it. I had all the steps handy on slips of paper and followed the directions carefully. To post you have to do this magical thing of “cutting” and “pasting”.  Forgive me you savvy readers who do this all the time and feel blasé about this process, but to me it is amazing and unbelievable. In fact I am a total doubting Thomas. I made the mistake of doing this late at night when I was beginning to fade- still I managed to do it. I pressed all the right keys, and viola--! It didn’t work. I tried again-nothing-nada, tipota! [ that’s Greek for “nothing” –I like to show off] I become frustrated and decided I wasn’t hitting the keys hard enough-so I banged hard and harder several times-the upshot of all this hostility was predictable. I lost my blog—GONE--.Into the ewiegkiet! I did not phone my daughter at midnight, I refrained with great difficulty and went to bed only to wake up feverishly at two a.m. knowing I had to rewrite the blog which I did, finally going to bed at four a.m.  The next morning I contacted my daughter who solved the problem—just one itsy bitsy mistake on my part, such pickiness! I rushed eagerly to my computer and completed the posting properly. NOTHING! There was nothing on the page .I tried again and again! Finally I looked closely at the directions and saw at the bottom of the page a “post it” sign. on which I clicked. Success at last! Feeling very proud and accomplished I went to bed. Next morning I eagerly checked my blog. There were a total of seventeen repetitions of it! Again I called my long suffering daughter. She discovered that the computer had saved all my attempts in a bank and was waiting further instructions and so when I had pressed the “post it “ sign ,it posted the entire repetition! My daughter laughed and said it was a good learning curve for me. The computer does not make mistakes she said, the only errors are human. I agreed that this was true but that my mistake turned out to be a good thing as now I had just created a subject for another blog so nothing was lost. As I meditated on all this I came to this conclusion: yes, humans are fallible and make mistakes and machines don’t. This is what makes us different- this is what makes us resilient- this is why we survive. We make our errors and turn them creatively into something new and better-like this very long-winded blog  So don’t despair my dear readers, don’t beat yourself up when you make mistakes-remember –your “error” may be the makings of “survival of the human race”--such as it is in all it’s frailties.