TECH-NOT-OLOGY

When My Tech Is Filled With Glitches, I Fill My Mouth With Chocolate, Bitches

Technology makes me hangry

I’ve been attempting to send a fax to the hospital for two hours. My fax responds by spitting out a sheet of paper. The paper reads no answer.

I keep feeding the fax paper and it keeps giving me the same no answer. Yes, I know the definition of insanity, but I think it’s different when it comes to technology. With technology, all bets are off.

Many years ago, brilliant minds invented an ingenuous machine called a personal computer and the only solution to fix it was “turn it off then turn it on again.”

That’s how weird tech is. Here was the most complicated machine yet known to humans and when it glitched people said, Oh, it’s not working? Try unplugging it.

Faxes are both tech and not tech. Faxes are from the tape recorder, adding machine family. Fax machines are like people from Iowa. Stubborn. I can say that because I married a person from Iowa. One of my favorite hobbies is watching salespeople try to sell him shit.

He stands there, like a fax machine, steady and unconvinced. There’s nothing they can tell him to make him buy what they are selling. He has done his research. He can not be hoodwinked.

We have an agreement when we are purchasing something big that I have to wait outside. You could sell me the shoes on my feet, the sidewalk, and the earth’s crest beneath that. It sounds like a good deal.

Maybe that’s why I keep feeding the fax paper — because I am optimistic. Because I believe the fax is out there.

I emailed the hospital and asked them to answer their fax machine. It’s not answering, I wrote.

Their response to my email was, We will get back to you within 48 hours.

Within that 48-hour window, the hospital emailed me again. This is our fax number. Then, they gave me the number I already dialed a hundred times.

I emailed back. I wrote, Still, no one is answering your fax machine.

They did not answer this email.

They did not even write, We will get back to you in 48 hours.

They wanted to show me, not to tell me, that there was no answer by not answering. Very meta.

As a writer, who has repeatedly been told, “show don’t tell” I could respect how the hospital was showing not telling me that they had no answer.

However, as a writer who thinks show not tell is stupid and archaic, I wanted the hospital to tell me something. to say anything to me.

They could tell me their fax machine was broken. Tell me they always forget to turn it on because they hated that machine. Tell me I was sending a fax on a printer! But to leave me hanging, like a loose cord with no wall to plug into, was too much.

The hospital's non-response got me thinking. Whenever I am dealing with tech, I remember people invented tech — alas tech mirrors people.

We live in a world where people avoid telling each other the truth because it is easier to avoid and lie.

When we eat a bad meal at a restaurant, we don’t offer to teach them how to cook— we sabotage them on Yelp.

When we get mad at a family member, we don’t tell them You hurt my feelings — we steal their journals and publish them online.

When we are unhappy in our marriages, we don’t tell our partners, we sign up for Tinder and date our partner’s sexy friends.

Humans don’t answer our faxes. Humans are broken faxes. Humans don’t know where the plug goes.

I called my neighbor to ask if I could borrow her fax. She said, I’m not sure if my printer is a printer or if it’s a printer and a fax.

Me too, I squealed. I’m not sure if my printer is also a fax. I just keep plugging in phone numbers, pressing send, and hoping.

Did we need an actual phone cord for the fax to be a fax? We wondered. Even if we had a phone cord, we didn’t have wall jacks anymore. They had been taken!

Our grandparents packed up our phone jacks into their suitcases. They thought we had no use for them. They didn’t want us to waste them. They possessed a depression-era mentality of saving ketchup packets and stealing forks from restaurants, so they took our jacks.

Now we have no jacks.

I sifted through the magical thinking part of my brain and wondered. Could I just blow into the fax-phone-cord-hole and make the fax phone feel acknowledged?

Could I stick something else in my fax-phone-cord-hole and attach it to an errant hole in my wall? Maybe there were still phone wires hidden inside my walls that would alert the fax and phone about each other’s existence.

About one thing, I was certain. I was in technology Purgatorio, trying to connect two different timelines, attempting to introduce Teddy Roosevelt to Beyonce. Dante could write this story. Joyce could spend hundreds of pages droning on about my tale.

Why are we even still using faxes? Let me go get my beeper and consult my Rolodex. Maybe they’ll know. Oh wait, they’re all out gallavanting with my Betamax at a Woody Guthrie concert.

Seriously, can we stop using faxes? Dinosaurs used them.

I returned to my magical thinking brain and wondered if I could send the hospital my brain chip. They put one in when I got my vaccine, right? The hospital can have my brain chip as long as they add the information I need onto it.

I was in the 7th level of hell. The part where I give up and eat. Technology makes me crazy and crazy makes me hungry. I consulted my refrigerator. It answered. It did not need to be opened and closed several hundred times. It acknowledged me upon first contact.

I loosened the top button of my jeans to make room for my resolution. This is why I like robes better than buttons. Buttons do the job but they judge. Robes don’t act concerned when I loosen the tie.

Does anyone even still have a phone line?

My neighbor called me back on my cell phone because that’s how people communicate. I asked if she figured out what her printer was. She said, no, but she remembered something.

She said we still use faxes in the medical field because it is the only way to ensure our medical information stays private. The hackers can’t even get into our fax machines.

That made me feel better until I bumped into another neighbor who works with the hospital.

She said we don’t actually need faxes anymore. Faxes used to be the only way to privately share medical info but now Google has been approved by HIPAA — unfortunately, nobody wants to change the old system.

Even talking about fax machines made my brain throw up. This was not a job for loosening the top button of my jeans. I slid out of them and slid into my robe. When my tech is filled with glitches, I fill my mouth with chocolate, bitches.

Wouldn’t you rather be laughing? Follow MuddyUm and Amy Sea

Thanks, Toni Crowe.