The Daily Novel

And all because of computers.

Yesterday my eldest daughter could not get her home email to work. Which is bad enough for anyone, but when you are trying to rear two kids, do a part-time job and a part-time MA, it is enough to send you round the bend. So I went round there today just after breakfast expecting to fix it in an hour. In fact I was there until nearly 5 PM.

There were, as so often, a number of problems. Not only was her email not working but it was impossible to get into the web at all. I spent some hours messing with the settings but nothing worked until I went in to the other room, and disconnected the Blueyonder box, left it off for a few minutes. And then turned it back on again.

It worked. But like a snail. I could have written a short page in the time it took to for the Blueyonder home page to load. But it was working so I decided to download the free software Firefox from the Mozilla site. And I was then able to reconfigure Holly’s email so that it worked both ways.

Except that I then found that her partner’s email would not work. I managed to get his working again but found that all his old emails, including a few he had not read, had disappeared.

I shall have to go there after breakfast tomorrow to try and find them. But if it does not take the whole day I shall do another posting tomorrow about why computers cause so much trouble, even to people who have spent quite a lot of time seeking to understand how they work.