[“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.
