A number of things can be true at once, but human beings like to be able to put their finger on one thing. For instance, here are some true things, some of which contradict one another; I believe in all of them at once:

• Technology is awesome
• Technology can be very badly designed
• Users are adaptable
• Users can be stupid
• Sometimes things don’t work.
• Things need to work.
• Tech support is condescending and blames the user.

My automatic cat feeder is a wonderful device. It can be programmed with an iPhone app to open and dispense fresh, chilled wet cat food three times a day to my food-motivated cat Uncle Louie, all without my intervention.

I just want to get Louie off my case. I want him to sit and stare mournfully at the feeder instead of at me. I want him to be able to eat when I am out of the house. I want him to stop picking on me.

It works superbly. Except for a couple of things: If Louie, say, hears the feeder open and hears it sound its bell, but he doesn’t come eat within the hour I have scheduled for that feeding, once the machine closes I can’t go back and open it again without disrupting the next feeding completely. I have to do a workaround, which usually involves opening the feeder and rewriting the schedule completely.

The other thing is that the app is hosted by AWS, which also hosts about a third of everything on the Web, and which went down on Monday when I was out of town.

So I couldn’t use my wonderful app to find out whether Louie had, in fact, eaten anything, until I got home, therefore defeating the purpose. I did not anticipate that the Internet of Things would betray me like that.

The app apologized two days later, but I was still not happy. Apparently many people restarted their feeders, losing all the programming, and some also deleted the app.

(I note that another nonfunctional aspect of the system is Louie, who is now nagging both me and the feeder.)

Another example occurred in my senior citizen art class. The teacher is an expert at teaching in person, and she also excels at making resources available to us for online study and for sharing and collaborating. She uses Google Drive to do it. She has a folder for every week, with resources we can view and where we can upload our work. She has done it successfully for years. I am thrilled to have someone like that for a teacher. I was a teacher myself, so I can sometimes be a difficult student; I know too much about what good practice looks like.

In fact, I am also an expert on teaching with technology myself. I have used Google Docs since they were available. I presented at an international educational conference on teaching writing using Google Docs collaboratively. I was the kind of teacher who had a classroom computer the moment they were available. I had my own website. Every time the administration insisted we all get on board with a new teaching technology, I was one of the first to move to the new platform, even though my prior system was working just fine. You want me to use an overhead projector? A SMART Board? Moodle? Blackboard? Canvas? Zoom? Fine. Sure. No worries.

Hell, when I taught college, I swiveled immediately to teaching remotely when the pandemic hit, even though I was teaching something that couldn’t really be taught remotely. (I was an onsite supervisor for practicing students learning to be teachers. I had to figure out how to teach people to be classroom teachers with no classrooms, no children, and no cooperating teachers. My students were on a deadline. The country needs teachers. My students needed to complete the certification requirements. We all managed.)

Unfortunately, things go wrong. And when they go wrong, the support staff never think it’s the technology that’s at fault. It must be the user’s fault.

I was pretty good at troubleshooting, but whenever something went wrong in my old job, the IT folks would arrive and first, assume that I didn’t know what I was talking about; the problem must not be with the technology but with me, the user. They looked for the common problems of naive users.

I’m not saying they didn’t have reasons to do that. It’s just that I had a track record, and they knew me already, and it would be nice to have them believe that I (a) had a real problem and (b) had already tried all the things an experienced person would try.

After a prolonged period of doing everything I had already tried, therefore, they would always say, “Huh.” And then they would try to figure out how to fix the thing I had said was wrong the first time around.

The designer and author Don Norman says that if users have problems with your product, the problems are the result of bad design, because good design is made with actual users in mind.

His example is the door that has to have a sign on it saying “Push,” because the handle is obviously designed to be pulled. First, if you want people to push something, put a push panel on it, not a handle. Second, human beings don’t read signs. It’s just a fact. They don’t. They are operating on automatic. You can wish they read signs all year long, but if there has to be a sign on something, that means it doesn’t work for human beings.

All this is to say that for three weeks, the art class teacher was trying to solve a problem, which was that the students couldn’t access her folders to upload their work, even though for the previous eight years her system had worked just fine.

It didn’t help, of course, that she did everything at home on a Mac, while the computer provided in the classroom was (a) Windows and (b) cloud-based, so she was fumbling with the commands she took for granted, and couldn’t fix the settings because she couldn’t get to the desktop. When the intern came in to help her, the only workaround they could figure out was to have the students email their work to the office and the office would upload it.

I immediately did that, because (a) I am not the teacher so it isn’t my job to be a know-it-all, and (b) a workaround is a workaround, even though I knew the problem was folder permissions.

I received a kindly email from the office, beginning, “I do so get that file uploading can be confusing.” It also said they had taken care of it for me.

At which point my brain, which had been reasonable up to this point, lit up with the fire of a thousand suns and I started having mental conversations with the office person.

(The conversation went, “Fuck no, file uploading is not confusing. I do it all the fucking time. Go help the instructor fix the permissions in Google Docs, for Christ’s sake. Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you people?” So obviously I couldn’t have the conversation.)

You see, this is a senior citizen program, and therefore the young person holds the belief, undoubtedly warranted in the case of many old people, that our technological naïveté is the problem. This ignores the fact that (a) many of us old people have been using every new thing that comes down the pike longer than they are alive, who do they think designed this shit in the first place? and (b) if the user is struggling, it’s tech support’s job to make it easier.

And then when I went to the link to check yesterday morning, none of the folder names showed, and I continued not to have access.

I went to class, and the instructor and I ranted to one another, and then she and I contrived to insert her USB stick (absolutely forbidden, of course) with all her files, and miraculously the problem (which, as we both knew, had to do with permissions in Google Drive, so why the USB stick fixed it neither of us knew) resolved itself.

I uploaded my work, and also transferred the work the office had uploaded to the wrong folder.

Of course, as I said, we absolutely should not be putting a USB drive into the university’s marvelous computer. There are consequences to that kind of thing. But by god, we got the instructor’s system to work, and that was the point.

So technology is awesome once you can get it to work, but until then you’re spending so much time getting it to work that I sometimes do not see the point. And I love cool technology. I drafted this blog post on a folding Bluetooth keyboard, on my phone, just because I could.

But until you can get it work, by any means necessary, it’s a royal pain.

For the record, just in case you were wondering, I do not use the same password for everything; my passwords are nonsensical strings of characters, which I change whenever I find out that my data has been compromised. I do not store them on a Post-It on my computer.

My late husband used the same password for everything, but he was a computer consultant so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything even when, once, he typed in all his information in response to an email, and we had to freeze his accounts and request new credit cards.

I also met one of my best friends online, but it was in the early 90s on CompuServe and (a) I have met her in person and (b) I have never sent her any money.

(OH ALL RIGHT. I confess. I keep the password to my computer on an index card deep in the recesses of my desk.)