The Nerd Gene

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

I envy writers who have the nerd gene. Nerdism is not a bad thing. Nerds are generally very patient and don’t lose their temper – essential qualities for online marketing. Nerds are capable of producing swanky websites with book trailer videos worthy of Spielberg, because they don’t lose their rag when the tech is uncooperative. As it so often is.

I have difficulties with online marketing because I suffer from techno rage. For me, working on a computer is often like working with a particularly annoying colleague – the sort of negative person who is always presenting problems instead of solutions. The sort of person who says things like ‘I can’t do that’ and ‘you’ll have to try something else’, and when you ask for suggestions they say, ‘I don’t know, you’re meant to be in charge here, you figure it out!’ The sort of person you feel like slapping, hard. I reckon computers should come with a dummy head attached to the top, so you’ve got something to punch when it displays those stupid messages saying something’s wrong without telling you how to fix it.

Upgrades are particularly annoying. Every time I get an upgrade, my computer refuses to do things it did perfectly well before, and I have to learn a more complicated way of doing them. It’s like having an old but good worker replaced by some whizz kid fresh out of college with all the gear and no idea.

And now we’re faced with Gutenberg, the “wonderful” new WordPress editor which we will all be forced to use from New Year’s Day onwards. In anticipation of this, I’ve been trying to learn the damn thing and have nearly had a nuclear meltdown in the process. It’s taken me two hours just to work out how to create a free test blog so I can experiment without messing up my current one. I don’t hold out much hope for success in navigating the rest of this unwelcome learning curve. I can see me being unable to write posts at all after midnight on December 31.

For this reason, I would like to wish all my readers a Happy New Year now. In case you don’t see me again.