Reasons technology sucks

Based on the events of the last few days...

1. It makes your students think you are available to answer their questions 24/7. They then email you again to check you got their first email if you don't reply within one working day. This is always at their convenience – they can ask me questions without leaving their houses, but expect me to always be at my office desk.

2. It means we don’t get as much personal, hand written mail as we might otherwise (thank you to Italian Speaker for the card)

3. It lets you stay up until the early hours of the morning (we’re talking well into ‘tomorrow’) to finish a lecture, and then, when you’re onto the final section, and you’re quite pleased with what you’ve got and you (as you’ve been doing all night) go to hit save, it not only does not save, but corrupts your file. You possibly lose 5500words of lecture (3000 of them written during the night), and in its place you get a series of boxes and oriental characters. This would not have happened with a pen and paper. Although coffee accidents are always a potential hazard in that medium.

4. It tells you there is a problem with the save. You breathe a sigh of relief, and hurriedly tell it to save this as something else so that the previous save will still exist, and you’ll only lose a small amount of work. It lets you think you’ve been clever to do this. Then it denies all knowledge of there ever being a file by the previous name. You then have no sleep and no shiny lecture to show for it. I don’t mind being sleepless when there’s a point to it, but …