By The Time You Get To Phoenix I'll Still Be Uploading

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I have a love-hate relationship with modern technology.

On the one hand I love that I can sit at my desk with a cup of tea, casually blogging about nothing in particular, then some stranger in a distant land can stumble across it and think, Ah, this Melody person sure is funny and insightful.

Or, more likely, What is this? This isn't what I Googled! I don't read English!

Except they'd think it in Portuguese, or something.

On the other hand, when things go wrong with technology it leaves us all screaming at our computers and tearing our hair out.

And things do go wrong. All. The. Time.

Right now, for example, the "Preview" button on Blogger isn't working. Why? I don't know. It usually works. Is it me? Is it them? It's not a terribly important issue, but I'm going to want to have a look at this before I hit "Publish." And, if I want our hypothetical Portuguese friend to look at this post and think his Portuguese thoughts about it, I need the "Preview" button to do what it's supposed to do.

One thing that blows my mind about modern technology is how easy it is to make and share your own music. My first demo was made using a cassette recorder and nervously hand-delivered to a musician who had his own studio. Eventually I recorded an EP at said studio and, several thousand dollars later, had a product I could share with people, provided I actively pushed it or they actively sought it out.

These days I can turn on my computer in the morning, plug in my microphone, and by the afternoon I've got a demo uploaded to SoundCloud for all the world to hear.

Amazing.

But with "Amazing" also comes the aforementioned computer-screaming.

I make videos for some of my songs and put them on YouTube. They're nothing special, just something to keep your eyes busy while you're listening to it. But every single time I've tried to upload a video, something has gone wrong. The infuriating thing is ... it's something different every time. One day I might upload a large file in 20 minutes, then on another day a small file will continually abort itself after an hour. One day I might upload something in a particular format, then on another day I try to upload a similar size file in the same format and it doesn't work.

What's with that? How can something specifically programmed to specifically perform a specific function be inconsistent? It drives me insane!

I recently gathered footage for a video over three days. Then I spent an afternoon putting it together. Then I spent four days trying to upload it to YouTube. Then I abandoned the footage and made a video using only a photograph and scrolling words. It was a tiny file. It was less than three minutes long. And yet, I still got this message:

Two hours? You're having a laugh!

All I want to do is put a video online. That's it. Why does it have to be so hard to do something so simple?

It's around about this time, when I'm entertaining thoughts of brutally bludgeoning my computer into tiny fragments, that it occurs to me just how incredible the task I'm trying to perform actually is. Even more incredible is the impatience I experience when my expectations of modern technology aren't met. When I can't do something that wasn't even possible 10 years ago. I wonder what kind of mind-blowing wonders I'll be getting impatient with a decade from now?

Still, I would like to upload my video, preferably before the decade is over.