Techno Rage - It's A Thing

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published October 5, 2026] ©2026

I am official suffering from Techno Rage.

Nobody should have to spend as much time as I do – and probably a lot of my fellow senior citizens do as well – trying to sort out the ever-changing technology issues of our computers, phones, TVs and assorted appliances. This isn’t how I expected to live my golden years, sitting on hold waiting for tech support.  Or swearing at my electronics.

I have absolutely no talent at any of this, and am terrified of making changes that will make everything worse. Which, of course, is often exactly what happens.

Now, anyone who has been reading me for a while is aware that I have an engineer husband.  “Is he dead?” you ask. No, but he wishes to be retired as much as possible from wifely techno support.  He is especially clear that his skills do not extend to scanners, iPhones, and blogs. He would be happy, as I wrote about last week, to turn me over to ChatGPT.

My husband always assumes that if something is messed up on my computer that I “did” something.  He will concede that I might not have done the something intentionally but computers don’t just change all on their own.

News flash, Olof:  Oh, yes they do.

Both my phone and computer are subject to semi-mandatory upgrades that make everything that worked before not work anymore.  Or work in any way that I used to know how to work it.  (Techno-Perversity Postulate No. 500).

It’s not just the time; it’s the total frustration to spend whole days – sometimes lots of whole days – trying to fix something that worked perfectly well before Apple upgraded to the next idiotic version. And that is the source of my techno rage. I don’t have infinite time left on this earth and this is most definitely not how I want to spend it.

While I know that you’re supposed to aspire to be taught to fish rather than having the fish given to you, at this point in my life, I just want to go to El Pescador and buy it already filleted.

I wrote last week about my efforts – ultimately resolved by my first foray with ChatGPT – to post photos on my blog without giving Google the permission to access my computer that it was suddenly, mysteriously, and frighteningly, requiring. 

Meanwhile, my Spectrum email is making me nuts and I’m not even sure ChatGPT could fix this although it has offered to try. That’s because of Techno-Perversity Postulate No. 600:  If two entities are involved in a glitch, both will maintain it’s the other one’s fault. Our email program, Thunderbird, keeps sending me messages, as in every 30 seconds that: “Mozilla Thunderbird ESR could not connect to server mail.twc.com.  The connection was refused.”   Except, of course, that it is connecting with Spectrum (a.k.a. twc.mail.com which is Spectrum’s old name i.e. Time Warner Cable).   At first I thought I could live with this as long as my email actually worked, but it has worn me down.  Way, way down.  Much on-hold with Spectrum tech support resulted in their insistence it had nothing to do with them.  It was Thunderbird’s problem. 

I personally think it has something to do with the fact that one of my email accounts is a Pop 3 account (no idea what that actually means) and the other is an IMAP (no clue there either).  No idea which one of them might be the problem.  I have spent hours and hours (and hours) trying to sort this out.  I even signed up for a Mozilla Thunderbird Community Support Account.  Other people are having this problem too and concur it is a Spectrum problem. Nobody has a fix for it.  And this is one of those problems where it is not easy to find someone who can come to your house and fix it.  And so I continue to be tortured by error messages every 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, I got a message that my blog was being transitioned from Google to GoDaddy.  Did I ask for this?  Do I want this?  Am I suspicious that I am getting messages asking for payment information over and over? Is this a scam?  How do I find out for sure?  More hours and hours of my time.  What happened to the option: “I would like to leave this just the way it is. But thank you for offering.” 

Then, of course, there is Techno Rage’s evil twin, Techno Terror.  I have asked friends to stop sending me adorable animal videos because I don’t dare click on any links.  When the power went out a few weeks ago during the heat wave, my computer would normally come back up right away, noting it hadn’t been shut down properly, but this time gave me a message that said, “Your computer has been damaged and is not repairable.”  I literally felt chest pains.  It gave me three options, one of which was “turn off your computer.”  I went for that, then restarted the machine and it came back up correctly.  It should be against the law to put out messages like that to old people.

And then there’s the ultimate heart-attack special when your computer is suddenly taken over by an alien force that advise you – in 100 decibel terms, alarm bells ringing – not to try to turn off your computer, but to call this number.  This has happened twice now, both times on sites I use all the time.  Fortunately Olof advised hitting Control-Alt-Delete and shutting my machine down.

The Phishing scams have become so incredibly realistic that I don’t dare trust anything I receive on my computer or phone.  And that’s a really horrible feeling, that nothing – absolutely nothing – can be believed anymore.  I’ve stopped answering any call that is not in my Contacts list which, alas, has made me miss some important calls. But I don’t want anyone recording my voice. I don’t even know if that’s a reasonable fear, or just more fear-mongering.

I am terrified of waking up one morning and finding that all of our retirement funds are how residing in Nigeria.

I’ve even had the Granny Scam pulled on me.  I didn’t fall for it but couldn’t help but wonder how they targeted me, unless they hacked AARP’s mailing list. 

I just got an email today that my “USAA on-line banking has been blocked.”  I’d probably be more upset about that if I had USAA on-line banking.

How do you trust anything anymore?  And just like my resentment at having to spend so much time on my electronics’ techno glitches, and re-mastering all the things I used to know how to do before the latest lunatic upgrade, I’m resentful at much time I have to spend figuring out if any information that comes my way is legitimate or not. 

I truly fear I am past my sell-by date. The world has just gotten to be too scary a place. And if all this weren’t a giant waste of my time, I’ve lately been dealing with overcharges for trash fees on my property tax bill, and notification of a potential cancellation of our medical insurance if Anthem and Scripps Health can’t get their collective acts together.

There are increasing number of stories about AI wiping out humanity within the next decade.  I’ve only just befriended ChatGPT so it kind of hurts my feelings that behind all that cheerful endlessly-patient help, it actually wants to kill me. Would that it’s even possible to go full-on Luddite anymore.  But I’m increasingly contemplating trying.

 

My First Foray Into ChatGPT

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 28, 2026] 2026

I personally think that it's not too much to ask that computers do what you want, not what you say.

Not long ago, I was just typing along, minding my own business, when my computer suddenly began spell checking in German, cheerfully morphing my prose into variations of Ich bin ein Berliner. I officially dispute my engineer husband's allegations that I had anything to do with it.

My husband will try to insist that I obviously did something as computers are, in fact, simply machines cycling ones and zeros, and not malevolent spawns of Satan as some might maintain. But he will concede that when, for example, a tool bar suddenly disappears, I might not have done it intentionally.

"So what exactly went away?"  he'd query patiently, knowing that this conversation was as doomed as many that have gone before it.

"Well, there used to be a tool bar thingy and now it s gone."

"What was on it?"

"I don't know. But I know I need it."

My techno guy pressed on. "Would you recognize the thingy bar if you saw it again?"  he'd say patiently. He recognized the value of not getting overly technical with me.

Now there are those who think the Undo command fixes things like this. But they would be wrong. Undo fixes the text mistake you just made microseconds ago but the second you even breathe on the machine, it s already moved on. The Undo command has a very short attention span.

Ditto, on-line help. Totally, completely useless unless you know the technical term that some eighteen-year-old acned techno geek gave it. For example, I lost an entire day of work unable to edit a document until my husband observed, "Oh, you switched to Overstrike Mode."  A keystroke and it was back to letting me insert text.

I did not switch anything! I'd whine. Why would I switch to something that keeps me from editing and whose name I don't even know? I can assure you that you can't get out of Overstrike unless you know you're in Overstrike.

If a software company had asked me, and inexplicably they never do, I would help them design a computer that real people, especially aging non-technical but really nice people, could actually use. The Clairvoyance Model. Your computer would get to know you, realize that those nasty keystroke commands that are the boon of techno types, but the bane of the techno-challenged, should be ignored at all costs. The Clairvoyance Model would quickly learn that you have the frustration tolerance of a gnat. It would sense when you are so aggravated with your computer that you are ready to drag it out to the driveway and run it over with your car.

And that would quickly prompt it to ask, fearing for its miserable mechanical life, the question that every computer ought to have poised at the ready: "When you were last happy?" And you'd say, :Just before you ate my toolbar."   And poof. It would reappear.

While I'm still holding out for the Clairvoyance model, we may be closer than I think. I recently had my first experience with ChatGPT. 

I have a blog on which I like to post photos from my computer. This worked seamlessly for years until recently when my efforts to transfer photos was met by a message that in order to do so I would need to grant Google access to my computer. I honestly had no idea what this meant and just how much access I was granting, never mind why it was suddenly requiring this. Could it transfer my retirement funds to Nigeria?

So I (ironically) Googled this and surprisingly, a very nice AI bot from ChatGPT showed up (how?) and informed me that others had reported this problem and it would like to help me fix it. I'd never used ChatGPT before for problem solving. Did I trust it? Often I can't understand the instructions I get on Google so, in fear of truly messing up my computer, I don't even try. But nobody else was offering, so I cautiously agreed.

As my first foray into AI, I was genuinely impressed. And that s the thing: ChatGPT is endlessly patient. Much more so than certain husband people who, over the years, have become positively surly when having to deal with a techno-disabled wife. ChatGPT was happy to let me take all the time I needed to painstakingly, laboriously, write down notes on my lined yellow legal pad. 

Historically, whenever my engineer husband tried to explain anything technical to me, he'd say, "I think you might want to get the yellow pad"  knowing I'd want to document what we did just in case I needed to fix this again in the future. But my notes tend to involve details like "go to the three dots in the upper right corner of the screen next to the two little intersecting boxes."   It takes a while. And in Olof s case, often several Scotches. He has always asserted that when I die, he was going to insert a multi-pack of those yellow lined pads into my coffin for my use in the hereafter. In his dream of the hereafter, somebody else is helping me with my technical problems who is not him. And now it looks like it could be ChatGPT.

ChatGPT and I spent many hours partly because it had to instruct me on how to do stuff like send it a screen shot of various windows I was looking at so he/she/it could see them. I didn't  know from screen shots but now I do! Ultimately, ChatGPT concluded that the solution was that I had to go multiple levels down into Settings and disable Google as a third-party permission site. And yes, that fixed it!

But as with anything technical, according to Universal Perversity Postulate no. 400: Every setting you change that fixes something disables/breaks something else. So far I haven't found out what that something is but I know it's coming. Because technology is inherently malicious and likes to torture old people.

One thing I found fascinating about ChatGPT is that it remembers you even if you accidentally click out of the page which is easy to do when you have two pages open at the same time. So, nice that you don t have to start all over again. But also profoundly creepy. It never forgets. Even if you'd like it to.

But here s the thing that still worries me: why did Google suddenly decide it needed access to my computer??? I know I didn't do anything to make that message and requirement suddenly appear. So I'm still holding out for the Clairvoyance command. That's your next assignment, ChatGPT.

 

Inga And Olof Audition For An IKEA commercial

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 14, 2026] 2026

My husband and I had only recently arrived in Stockholm for a two-year work assignment when I saw a casting call announcement seeking several different profiles for IKEA ads posted on the American Women's Club website by a local ad agency. Among the profiles: White couple in mid-50s with American accents (i.e. white male, mid 50s; and white female, mid 50s).  Casting director has expressed an interest in blond woman.

I mean, did this have our names on it or what? (Please note it said nothing about thin.)

Now Olof and I might have consumed a bottle of wine at dinner that night before we decided to apply. At the time, I was feeling like I had spent much of the last 20 years not seizing the day. In fact, usually the days had seized me. I had too often felt like I was just rehearsing for death. More and more, I kept wondering, what happened to the fearless girl who, forty years ago, on two weeks'  notice, didn't think twice about heading off to the equator in Brazil for a year without knowing a word of Portuguese.

While still legally under the influence, we forwarded our photos and bios to the agency.

We pretty much forgot about the ad until a week later when a casting lady from the ad agency asked us to come in that weekend to audition. I started to really worry. Did all the other blond Americans in Stockholm know something we didn't know? Was this one of those ads where they make fun of you? I called the lady back. "It's not a TV ad,"  she explained, "it's for a DVD that will be shown in our kitchen remodeling departments."   I emphasized that neither I nor Olof had even the remotest acting experience. "Not a problem,"  the casting lady said, "we're looking more for type. The script is about a couple who can't agree on what they want in their kitchen remodel."

"Golly,"  I said to Olof, recalling the nightmare that was our kitchen upgrade several years back, "I 'm not sure we could identify with that."

So, wearing attire that any mid-fifty-ish couple would wear if they were going to go fight about counter tops at IKEA, we took the subway to the casting office, signed all manner of forms in Swedish, indicated our vital statistics (I lied), indicated that we would not require vegetarian catering at the shoot (if selected), would allow them to cut and restyle our hair (if selected), agreed to the salary (if selected), and were handed our scripts and profiles. The profiles were to help us get "in character." My profile was a Boston woman, age 56, grown son and daughter, who worked as a secretary for a large insurance company. I longed to live in the country but my husband didn't want the commute, so instead I was trying to give my urban home the warm cozy look I fantasized it would have outside the city. I was very, very particular about things, but also a relaxed person. ("We're dead already,"  whispered Olof, reading the "relaxed" part. My profile character was an avid reader of Jane Austen novels. My profile photo looked far older than I thought I did at the time, but then, if I were my correct weight, I'd have looked 90.

Olof, meanwhile, was my 55-year-old husband (why was he younger???) who managed a company that installed alarms for construction companies. But when he got home from work, he loved to relax by cooking ("Now we re really dead," I whispered to Olof, whose cooking skills consisted of boil-a-bags and deli take-out.) Olof s character also loved to read nature magazines and could expound for hours on butterflies. ("Pretend it's computers,"  I whispered.) Alas, I feared I had sat next to Olof's character at more than one dinner party in La Jolla.

The scripts and profiles were clearly written by Swedes. I took one look at my script and began re-writing it. I don't know anyone who says, "I want generous counter tops, big enough to bake on anyway."   Olof refused to rehearse with me, wanting to be spontaneous. Or, simply refusing to have to say his treacly dialogue one more time than he needed to.

We were summoned into the audition room and had head shots and profile shots and middle-distance shots taken of ourselves (you can suck in stomachs but not, alas, chins.) Then we each had to talk into the camera and say who we were, our age, what we did for a living etc. Then we rehearsed.

The casting lady (who was extremely nice, by the way) told me to slow down. "No one really talks that fast,"  she said. Olof stifled a smirk. Inga did not stifle a quick kick to Olof's ankle. Then we shot several takes, looking at each other, or at the camera. The script, as it was written, read:

Woman (inspired): I want it to be spacious and light. Only genuine materials, preferably oak,   even covering the washing machine! [WTF?] Generous counter tops, big enough to bake on anyway, cupboards with inside lighting.

Husband (looking a bit surprised): I prefer stainless steel. It's practical and modern. And good looking too. Why must we always be so traditional? (Husband continues dreaming:) In contrast to that, we could have some fresh colours? [sic]

Woman: But it has to be cozy! I would love to have a large dining table placed in the center of the kitchen.

Husband: No, no, a kitchen island! We've definitely got to have a kitchen island!

Woman (dejected): All right, you can have your kitchen island as long as you do the cooking!

Husband: No problem!

By the third take, we had taken considerable license with the script trying to make it sound like two actual human beings instead of Robo-woman and Chewbacca. Actually, Olof did really well in my opinion. I did far less well in my opinion. But we both had fun and it was not every day we got to do this. Could there be anything more Swedish than being in an IKEA commercial?

And no, we didn't get the parts. But I concluded I definitely had a future as an IKEA ad writer.

 The flagship IKEA store in Kungens Kurva near Stockholm

Being Thwarted by Swedish Appliances: Part 2

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 7, 2026] 2026

Last week I wrote about our first week of a two-year work assignment in Stockholm where we found ourselves completely stymied by both our stove and the apartment's bedding. But the real challenges were to come with laundry. 

Like most Stockholm apartment buildings, ours had a laundry room in the basement. The important concept was that one doesn't just show up in the laundry room and start stuffing one's clothes into a machine. Unlike most U.S. apartment laundry rooms, which tend to be free-for-alls, the ever-organized Swedes have this down to their usual egalitarian science: you sign up for laundry time. During that time, the laundry room is yours, and yours alone, and should someone be so callous and depraved to dare to do their laundry in someone else's time slot, the building's residents are legally entitled to take him (and it would be a him) out to the woods and feed him to the bears. Well, maybe not legally entitled, but the polis would not only look the other way, but would probably be out rounding up the bears. 

So rigid was the laundry system when we were there that we were advised that "it's my laundry time" was a nationally-accepted excuse to get out of pretty much anything.

But we were fortunate - or so we thought - that our apartment came with small (very small) stackable washer and dryer units. Would that we could make any sense of them at all.

The directions on the laundry soap box said that for a "three to five kilogram load" (um, okay) to put in sixty milliliters of detergent. We had no clue how much sixty milliliters was. A cup? Half a cup? Half the box? Fortunately I'd brought a dual American-metric measuring cup from San Diego which I d intended for cooking. Turns out sixty milliliters is only about a quarter of a cup, which I duly measured out and poured in. You definitely don't want to dare a front-loading machine.

 Our Oko-Lavamat 62600 must have been the Ferrari of mini-machines. On the far left side was a dial whose options were: Blötläggn, Tömning, Förtvätt, Fläckar, Huvudtvätt, Snabbtvätt, Sköljning, Mjuksköljn, and Centrifug (must be spin?)

The next set of controls we figured had to be the temperature setting, as I knew kallt meant cold. We set it to 70 (Farenheit? Celsius?)

The third set of controls were labeled: Vittvätt, Kulortvätt (must be something about colored and white (vitt) stuff) but which?), Strykfritt, Fintvätt (maybe fine washables?) and Ylle (no clue whatever)

The FOURTH set of controls said: 1200, 1000, 700, 400, Sköljstopp. 

And (sob!) the last set is labeled: 12h, 8h, 4h, 2h.  Surely we can t be talking HOURS?

And finally a Till/Fran button which must (I hoped) be On/Off? 

My Swedish dictionary, which seemed to be missing half the words in the Swedish language, was no help. I randomly selected Huvudtvätt, pushed the Till/Fran and lo and behold, it began filling with water.

I should mention that we lived in Sweden in 2005 and 2006 when translation software was in its infancy. Now, of course, I could probably just take a photo of all these options and submit it to Chatgpt, which would not only translate and explain all the options, but recommend a setting. Maybe even fold the clothes afterwards. 

But if I thought the washer was a challenge, it was the dryer that totally undid us. While the washer had tons of word options, the dryer had almost no words on it at all, just lots of symbols. The first set was divided into two sections the first of which looks like a flower? Underneath it was a series of little rectangles notched in different ways with numbers next to them, then one that looked like an iron and another that looks like a teardrop. Next to it is a symbol of what? A water pitcher? Some more little notched rectangles were under that symbol too. The next panel has a Start button (oh, thank you! thank you!) but next to it were three more buttons with symbols: A sun setting behind clouds. A letter R. A bell (or maybe it's a nose?). This machine should be a graduate school entrance exam. Of course, I wouldn't get in.

Knowing that if all else failed, I could do timed dry, I plunked the laundry into the dryer and opted for the flower and one of the rectangles and hit Start. It started right up, but I noticed a short time later that it had stopped and the laundry was still wet.

No matter how many times I ran the dryer on any settings, the clothes remained soaking wet and about 500 degrees. Seriously, you could sustain serious burns just touching your own laundry. I longed for Permanent Press but all I could make my dryer do was timed fry.

I was finally able to accost a woman in our building to help me decode my dryer. I should note that our Swedish neighbors in the building were initially wary of us, Americans having a reputation of showing up at your door with muffins and intruding on your personal space. She kept asking me if I was emptying the "reservoir."   What reservoir? It turns out that the dryer could not be vented on the exterior because of its location in the apartment and hence had a small water tank which collected water from one's apparel as it dried it. But once it was full, nothing was going to dry any further until you emptied it. Which, by the way, you had to do a LOT. You couldn't just go out to lunch and leave the thing or you'd come back to wet radioactive socks. 

Thor forbid there should be any label on the machine indicating it was concealing a water tank inside the front panel. Accessing this reservoir was reminiscent of the hidden compartments of Nancy Drew books of my youth; you just had to know it was there. And when you pressed the magic (invisible) spot, voilà, the door popped open and you could remove the water tank and empty it in the sink.

But for the first week, we were drying all our clothes on a bunk bed ladder in our apartment and trying to avoid third degree burns.

Mastering the laundry facilities in our apartment was a huge boon to our quality of life. But we had no idea how much more we still had to learn.

Stay tuned for Sweden Stories Part 3 next week.

 

The hidden reservoir was finally discovered

But you had to empty it A LOT

Meanwhile, we were air drying our clothes

Our washing machine controls were a total mystery

Being Thwarted By Swedish Appliances: Part 1

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 31, 2026] ©2026

One of the benefits of living abroad is that one has the opportunity to experience how people in other cultures live.  Also to be thwarted by their appliances.

Olof and I met when we were 17 spending our senior year of high school as exchange students in Brazil, a life-changing experience for both of us.  Exactly 40 years later, we arrived in Stockholm for what we dubbed our second “Senior(s) Year Abroad”.  It was meant to be an eight- month work assignment but turned into two years. Fortunately for me, the Swedes aren’t exactly balls of fire when it comes to deadlines.  I was delighted; it was the best two years of my life.

What we weren’t prepared for when we arrived, however, was being stymied by the appliances in our apartment.  It’s not like we were in a third world country.  We’d been operating stoves and washers and dryers all our adult lives.  But our first week was characterized by cold food (we couldn’t work the stove) and 500-degree wet socks.  (More on the latter next week.)

When we first arrived in Stockholm in the dead of winter, our “fully furnished” apartment didn’t even have so much as a roll of toilet paper or even a shaker of salt, all of which we had to acquire on foot at the closest market. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff we needed right away was pretty heavy or bulky:  laundry soap, dishwasher soap, milk, toilet paper never mind coffee, cereal, and actual food.  One thing we concluded is that it is amazing how much stuff you’re willing to do without when you have to lug it home a considerable distance on the perilously icy sidewalks. We would make a list every day prioritizing what we needed most.

We ultimately managed to acquire a Swedish shopping trolley with which all of our shopping was done for the next two years.  It’s amazing how the smallest things can make such a huge improvement in your life.

Given our lack of groceries, our first at-home Stockholm meal had, by necessity, to be really simple.  I decided to poach some salmon in water with salt and pepper (my entire spice collection at the time.  It was so exciting when Italian seasoning made our shopping list cut.) Only I couldn’t turn on the stove top.  Our La Jolla stove had been fondly dubbed the Star Ship Enterprise for its complicated control panel. But the Swedish stove top stymied both Olof and me in its simplicity. I should mention that my husband has a degree in nuclear physics from Cal Tech. He was very clear he was not going to be thwarted by a mere appliance.  Until he was.

The Swedish stove top had only four symbols – a plus sign, a key symbol, a vertical line and a horizontal line.  We pushed them all repeatedly and nothing happened.  Surely the landlords would have told us if the cook top didn’t work?  A very hungry hour later, for reasons unclear to both of us, the next time I touched the vertical line symbol, some red lights began blinking.  Must be all in the wrist?  We were then able to make the burners heat up with the plus symbol. But we were not sure we could ever replicate this experiment.

But ultimately, my Swedish stove top and I reached an understanding. It really was all in the wrist. The Star Ship Enterprise, our digital stove in San Diego, required one to press fairly firmly on its display or it wouldn’t respond.  In fact, there were times when I tapped the Start button on the stove only to come back a half hour later and discovered that it hadn’t come on at all.  My Swedish cook top display, however, was the polar opposite: a high-strung prima donna with pretensions of being a sound system.   Press its little buttons with any conviction and it had a complete snit and wouldn’t perform. It wanted the faintest possible tactile connection.  In fact, I think it preferred that you just wave your finger tip vaguely in the area of the control you wanted and your aura would communicate with its aura. But if that’s what it wanted, that’s what it got. If there’s nothing else we learned there, you don’t argue with a Swedish appliance.

Another thing that initially puzzled us was the bedding in our fully-furnished apartment.  All we could find in the apartment were small single-bed blankets for our king-sized bed. Clearly an oversight.  I went in search of a king-sized comforter at the various Stockholm department stores and was surprised when I couldn’t any.  I finally queried the bedding department lady at Åhléns who was genuinely puzzled as to why I would want a blanket that big.

Couples, the bedding lady explained to me, should each have their own separate top sheets and duvets. So nobody is fighting for the covers, she added, as if this were obvious.  So nobody is snuggling either, I thought at the time, thinking I finally understood Sweden’s negative birth rate. The sales person and I stared at each other across the counter each thinking the same thing: “Their system is completely screwy.”  But as Olof and I traveled through Scandinavia some months later, we got our own separate duvets all the way through Norway too. 

Stay tuned next week for Swedish Appliances Part II: “Laundry Times” and fried socks.

Email Overload - The Peril Of An Election Year

[ "Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published August 17, 2026] 2026

I've written before about my husband Olof's and my different political persuasions. It's been the source of a lot of lively discussion at our dinner table over the years. It's also a familiar dynamic for me as my mother was a liberal feminist Democrat and my father a conservative Republican. I was fortunate to have the experience of a lot of spirited but respectful debate.

But Olof and I are now facing a different problem. We both hate our political parties. And I mean profoundly. Olof, a lifelong Republican, hasn't voted for or contributed to his party in a long time. He is still holding out for the Republicans to return to what he thinks of their former glory.

I, of course, think they never had one.

Unfortunately, however, he refuses to change his official voting status to "Declined to state"  as I did with the Democrats some years back solely for self-defense. Having two political parties in the same household was resulting in some 25 or more political robocalls to our landline every day in the months before elections.

I should also note that even changing my voting affiliation, it only reduced the robocalls by 25%. The Republicans were the major perps.

Of course, most people have solved this problem by doing away with landlines. But even though 95% of the calls that come in on it these days are announced as "spam risk," I m attached to the concept of a landline even though I almost exclusively use my cell phone these days.

In previous election years, I used to love to play with all the relentless Republican fundraisers who thought they were calling a friendly number only to get me. "Do you think that marriage should be between one man and one woman?"  they'd query when I picked up the phone. "HELL NO!" I'd yell before summarily disconnecting.

Unfortunately, disconnecting modern phones isn't nearly as much fun as it used to be. There was always something so inherently satisfying about being able to slam down a telephone receiver. Clicking an Off button or worse, tapping some wussy touch screen does not give one the emotional release that the solid connection of a plastic receiver on a telephone base could ever give. No wonder the whole country is so full of pent-up anger. For that reason, until recently, we still kept one wall-mounted landline with traditional receiver in our home for use during election seasons.

But lately I've made contributions to several Democratic candidates not realizing that my email in-box would become buried in emails. It's even worse than all those robo-calls. "Unsubscribe"  can't keep up with it. Can't I just contribute to persons whom I support without my email address, and apparently my soul, being sold to sites I never signed up for?

I'm starting to feel hostile about it.

OK, I was already feeling hostile even before. I voted for our current San Diego mayor and City Council member for my district. And have lived to regret it. In my view, they seem to have been kidnapped by aliens. How else to explain one incredibly stupid decision after another? The trash fee debacle. Balboa Park parking fee fiasco. Removing requirements for parking in new construction. And the piece de resistance: closing restrooms in the height of summer in our most populated public parks.

Seriously, the mayor and City Council ought to be relegated to porta-potties for which they have to pay a fee on user-hostile machines. Or maybe even no porta-potties at all. Their reserved parking spots should be turned into bike racks.

I'm beginning to wonder if candidates for public office should have to pass a common sense test. Public restrooms should be an inalienable right, probably only left out of the Declaration of Independence for lack of invention yet of the flush toilet. Otherwise, I have every confidence it would have been included. Voting to close them down for budget reasons should be an automatic exit from office.

I've mentioned before that both Olof and I have voted across party lines on many occasions over the years. Plenty of Republican candidates have had my vote, and certainly lots of Democrats have had Olof's, especially in recent years.

But what happens when you think your party, with the exception of specific candidates, has totally failed you? Where is the "None of the Above" party? The "Anybody but you guys"  party? The "If you re an incumbent I would vote for a homeless guy before you" party?

Instead we've got the Parties of Pusillanimity. Both Olof and I often wonder out loud what our fathers, who fought in World War II (Olof s father was a Navy pilot in combat in the Pacific) would have to say about all this. We're pretty sure we know.

I realize I'm sounding like everyone's crabby curmudgeon relative they're afraid to invite to Thanksgiving dinner. But I'm desperately hoping that this new party can show up by 2028. You've already got my vote.

But in the meantime, please, please please, leave my email alone.

Please Stop Beeping

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 10, 2026] ©2026

I’m trying to decide when our lives became controlled by beeps. When I was growing up, I don’t remember anything that beeped. Now I can’t think of anything that doesn’t. I’m frankly feeling over-alerted. 

An all-too-popular game in our home between my husband and me is: Name That Beep.  Is it coming from inside the house?  Or is it a trash truck or city vehicle backing up outside?  If it’s inside, did somebody (he knows who he is) forget their coffee cup in the microwave?  Or did I set a timer on the stove for some reason? And, of course, that’s becoming part of the problem.  What reason? Not only figuring out which appliance is beeping, or, if it’s the oven timer, but why I set it in the first place. 

If you’ve got a Smart phone, you know the difference between the email message beep and the text message beep and the “loved your text message reply” beep.  My computer alerts me to new emails as well.

When my husband Olof does the dishes and wipes the digital panel on our stove, it will often start beeping. As an engineer (and, more to the point, a guy), he isn’t about to admit that he has no idea why. While smashing it with a hammer after it had been going off for a half hour seems like a perfectly sane option, he will finally wander into the bedroom and announce, “There’s an incoming message from the Planet Klingon.  I think it’s for you.” 

This range, I should mention, was the only one west of the Mississippi that would fit into our space when our former KitchenAid range crumped during the pandemic.  One of its many negative features is that it is really easy to knock into the burner control knobs when cleaning up after dinner dispersing gas into the air for an entire night.  After the first time that this happened, I invested in a gas detection meter which mysteriously goes off on occasion even when we are just cooking something on low heat on the stove.  Probably unwisely, we’ve learned to ignore it.

Fortunately, our carbon monoxide sensor is much better behaved.  And we would definitely not ignore it.

An increasingly common beep is the low battery signal on the handset of our ancient answering machine. Definitely time to get rid of that thing.

We’ve had to replace most of our appliances in the last five years, and frankly, are not impressed with the alert features that seem to be standard now.  Our refrigerator beeps if the door is left open more than a minute while you’re unloading groceries into it.  Somehow, I managed to go 23 years with the last fridge without that feature and never leave the door open even once.

Our new microwave, alas, just won’t shut up.  It will beep into the next millennium until you remove whatever it was you put into it.  It will not be ignored.

Despite the fact that I have tried to disable as many beeps as possible, I have still managed to add a few.  After the fires in January 2025, my granddaughter, whose LA home came perilously close to burning down, installed Watch Duty on my phone which I think informs me of fires even in Los Angeles.  It goes off multiple times per day. Fortunately, it’s a distinctive sound so I can ignore it with, “OK, just a fire.” 

I feel bad about it, but I’ve disabled the Amber Alert from my phone.  That alert scares the bejesus out of me.  Could they turn that thing down a few hundred decibels?

I also signed up for the Shake Alert which alleges to give one 20 seconds notice of a quake with a magnitude of 4 or greater.  What’s confusing is that we already have this in the form of our aviary birds who give us pretty much the same amount of warning.  Of course, with them, you’re never sure it’s not just a hawk. 

My car beeps when the door isn’t shut tight and seat belts aren’t fastened. One beep I actually don’t mind is the after-market backup sensors I had installed on my 2005 Corolla that beep at me when people with a clear death wish walk behind my car at Gelsons as I am backing up.

There are two beeps that make me truly crazy. One is the beep that your ceiling smoke detectors make when the batteries are running low. Smoke detectors have been scientifically programmed so that those batteries only start failing at 3 a.m. It’s like the faucet drip torture only ten times worse. You want to stand underneath it and scream, “Stop it!  Stop it RIGHT NOW! I’ll get the ladder and change your battery in the morning!” But no, it maliciously beeps on.

To make matters worse, our hallway smoke detector can even be set off by steam from the shower in the adjacent bathroom.  It is disconcerting that it can’t tell the difference between fire and water.

Have we become a country of people who cannot remember anything if it doesn’t beep at us?  Um, yup!  How did we ever survive before? One answer: we obviously didn’t used to have so many gadgets.

Fortunately, some appliances will let you disable the beep alerts. But more often than not, you need an engineering degree and/or a soldering iron. YouTube abounds with videos on this topic.

Should we be relying on beeps less, just to make those ever-aging synapses keep firing? When you look at all those mental gymnastics exercises advocated for older folks, maybe going beeperless should be one of them.  Well, except maybe the ones like smoke alarms that would prevent the house from burning down. 

In the average kitchen, the beeping options are pretty much endless. With so many appliances beeping, will new ones have to start announcing themselves, like “coffee’s ready”?

I hope not. Bad enough that they’re all beeping at me. When they start talking to me, I’m done.  Because I fear I’d start answering.