So, I couldn’t get on my blogger account this morning. I went to my login page and it wanted me to re-enter all of my information and I didn’t remember which of my plethora of passwords I was using for it. So I did the “forgot my password” routine, received the email, had to enter the warped letters for security, received the next email, link took me to a page to enter my new password. But nothing happened. Spin spin spin.
I tried it again. Nothing. Went back to blogger page, tried a few potential passwords. Nope. Tried my “forgot my password” routine again. Spin spin spin. Only this time the page won’t load at all – I can’t try to enter new passwords because the spaces won’t even come up.
With my amazing reasoning abilities, I deduce that Something Is Wrong with Blogspot.
The logical thing to do is wait, come back later and see if they’ve sorted it out. After all, nothing on my end has changed since I logged on last night. But. I. Just. Can’t. Do. It.
I have to keep rechecking the pages, reclicking the links, to once again discover that nothing is working. Spin spin spin.
There’s an old saw that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, variously attributed to Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin or whoever else seems a likely source of pithy remarks. (Wikiquote says it’s actually from Rita Mae Brown – but that doesn’t give the same caché.) It’s one of those bits of common wisdom that gets circulated and recirculated like a salient bit of gossip at a cocktail party. It arouses our interest because we recognize our own behavior in it. In fact, if you Google that exact phrase, you’ll get in the neighborhood of 17,000 hits.
The prospect of insanity worries us all. And somehow, the user/computer relationship exacerbates the fear. Perhaps because, often, on the computer if you keep doing the same thing over and over, you DO get different results. Perhaps this indicates that the universe is not a fundamentally rational place at all.
So, I broke my little spin spin spin cycle and opened Word to write this out. Akin to working on paper – heaven forfend – should the power go out.
At least I feel good about having a different result.
Conversely, trying every possible permutation of actions but still getting the same result is the definition of:
Ikea Furniture Construction
Congressional Elections
Marriage Counseling
And, in my case, any kind of artwork.