Maybe it was Benjamin Franklin, maybe it was Albert Einstein (Google hasn’t really made up its mind on who should get the credit)… but someone once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Technology seems to be an exception to this rule. You do the same thing over and over again, and you GET different results… ironically, it drives you insane. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love technology. (Still.) But I defy anyone to explain these phenomena to my satisfaction.
I’m in charge of making weekly Power Point presentations for our worship service at Zion. I tend to get a little OCD about font sizes and line spacing and punctuation. I want the presentation to be an aid, not a distraction, for the congregation as they worship. And also, for whatever reason, this is one of the few areas in my life where I turn into a perfectionist. So why is it that sometimes when I cut and paste the Power Point slides from this file into that other file, all of a sudden the text is yellow? It wasn’t yellow before. None of the text in my new presentation is yellow. Why would it become yellow? And even more disconcerting – why is it yellow SOMETIMES, but not all the time? I swear I’m doing the exact same thing every time. And why, when it does happen to change colors, is it ALWAYS yellow? It never randomly turns blue, or red, or anything else.
Another example. Several weeks ago, the computer and projector at Zion (randomly?) started disagreeing about screen resolution. Now, sometimes the edges of some Power Point lines are cut off. Or the projector goes blank for a second or two and then flashes back on with an “auto-corrected” resolution. (So much for not being a distraction.) Okay, WHY? Why did it just start doing this? What changed? Why, if the text is centered, does one edge of the line get cut off but not the other? Why doesn’t the projector just PROJECT what it’s attached to?
Okay, fine – I can click the little “use source formatting” button after I paste slides into a presentation, and they go back to the way they should be. And I can format the slides ahead of time so that they don’t go all the way to the edge of the screen, thus not cutting off any words or letters. They’re easy solutions, in the grand scheme of things.
But I shouldn’t have to do that.
It should work.
Why doesn’t it work?
The inexplicable-ness of both of these scenarios gets me fired up.
There is no rage that can compare to technology rage. I feel your pain.
By: Bess on July 14, 2010
at 7:50 am
Somewhere down in some formatting menu, a “default style” of some kind specifies yellow text. All you have to do is dig through every menu and check every default. Like if you opened a “new” powerpoint document and selected white for text and black for background, and then found the option that says “use this as default …”
By: Dad on July 15, 2010
at 12:08 pm