First published in Tri-Town Transcript – Boxford, MA Jun 1, 2018
By Esther Baird
I’ve had a personal computer in my house since I was about 7, which was around 1980 (don’t do the math, I’m a “mom age”). I was raised to be computer savvy. And unless you have an entire evening don’t ask my husband, the child prodigy, about his third-grade class that wrote a coding book in Logos and, wait for it, got published.
The point is I was destined to be someone for whom computers made sense. I was born into it. I married into it.
“I don’t understand it at all!” I admitted this to Angela, the lucky winner who answered the phone when I called about my new MacBook Air.
And called again. And again. And, here almost three months since I upgraded from my old Mac to this new one, we speak almost weekly to try and understand the deeply impossible problems I’ve created on a computer renowned for its simplicity.
The crux of the matter is my photo, uh, situation. Both on my laptop and my iPhone.
“Wow, look at that. You have 8,000 photos on your camera roll,” Angela exclaimed in one of our first chats. We screen share, so she can see both my computer and phone while we talk.
“No I don’t. I’ve been backing up and then deleting.”
Silence. But I had the backups to prove it. And, ok fine… the originals. Deleting is a scary and I don’t always fully commit.
I tried a new tactic. “Well that IS a lot of photos, but it pales in comparison to the 67,931 photos in my library.”
She drew in a breath.
I continued before she could comment: “That makes 8,000 seem small right? Angela? Right?”
She’s so patient when we talk. This despite the fact that I’m sure my file must be named, “You Can’t Even Believe This Lady!!”
Over time, I’ve learned a few things about Angela. I know she is thorough yet kind. She has a southern drawl that makes me feel calm and understood. Her laugh is contagious. And I know she likes flowers because she cited an example of how a person, with any shred of organizational dignity, might file their photos based on her collection of flower pictures that she off-loaded to an external drive.
You know what Angela knows about me? Every. Single. Thing.
You know those sweaty photos you take of yourself to track your workout progress? You know those close up photos you take of your eyes when you realize they are not quite straight. You know those “before I started a new face cream” and “after: photos? Photos of your child’s super-bloody scraped knee because it’s just so gross you can’t believe it? The dinner every one hated and you threw out? The Cosmos you drink every Friday (possibly also Saturday)? Your dog’s poop because your dog eats socks and you had to prove that the sock came out?!?!?
You can act like you don’t take those photos. You can lie on Facebook and Instagram, but you can’t lie to Angela.
When we screen share, I try to click on lovely scenic shots where I’m dressed and showered. But inevitably, as I move my cursor around, the 15 photos I took of my jean cuffs to send to my friend because I wasn’t sure which cuff roll was in style, are the photos she sees.
It’s like the anti-Facebook. It paints a picture of a mom who lost it years ago, can’t cook, doesn’t glisten but actually sweats shirt-drenching buckets, and has some sort of demon dog that takes joy in expelling bodily fluids.
Sometimes I casually open up a Bible study I’m writing as if to say: “Look: Esther is reading the Bible!! She teaches it!!” But just behind that page, is a photo of my teeth when I couldn’t find a mirror and needed to know if the kale I had for lunch got stuck. It did.
And yet, Angela hangs in there with me. Our next chat is tomorrow when we hope to draw near to a photo resolution and open up that thorny can of worms in which I tried to reformat the hard drive of my old MacBook but instead inadvertently set it to run on an antiquated operating system that doesn’t seem to even know what the internet is.
Actually, it may be the operating system I knew when I was seven. In which case, perhaps I’ll be just fine.