Your tech support needs tech support

A story about what happens when our analog shit hits the digital fan

Hello and welcome! I’m Michael Estrin. I write Situation Normal for people who take their humor with a side of humanity and a dash of insight. (Read to the end for a picture of my writing partner, Mortimer🐶)

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Your tech support needs tech support

Sometimes I tease Christina that I married for tech support. That’s not true, I married for love, but tech support is a nice perk.

I’ve never met a computer I couldn’t crash, or a printer I couldn’t jam. My battles with the Alexa are the stuff of legend. I’m not proud of this, but there are times when I can’t even watch television because we own one of those “Smart TVs,” which means the television knows I’m a Luddite it can fuck with for shits and giggles.

“It’s like there’s a dark cloud following you around,” Christina told me once. “You get near tech and things go kaflooey.”

In a world dominated by tech, this is a bad a look for a human. Most people celebrate when new technology comes out, which means most people celebrate four million times a day. But not me. Everyday, there are four million new things that can go wrong for me.

Ideally, I’d live in a perpetual state called 1998, when phones were dumb and tethered to walls, when my CDs always worked, and when it was socially acceptable to tell your professor that you couldn’t turn in the assignment because your computer took a massive shit.

But that’s a fantasy. There’s no going back. Humanity strapped itself to a rocket ship called technology thousands of years ago, when some asshole ape picked up a rock and used it to smash open a coconut. The rocket ship is accelerating, but there’s no telling where it’s headed, or if we’ll survive the trip. That doesn’t matter, though. It’s 2024, and if you’re not strapped in and geeked out over tech, you’re fucked.

I’d be fucked, if it wasn’t for Christina.

I can never repay my wife for all the times she’s unfucked our thermostat, fixed a glitchy app on my phone, or trouble shot a piece of software that was advertised as an “easy button” for some task. The best I can do is land a job as a beta tester at a technology company. My pitch to Silicon Valley is simple: if you can get it to work for me, it can work for anyone.

That job might be another fantasy, though. Silicon Valley prefers to beta test its stuff on hapless consumers who pay for the privilege of their Guinea pig pig status with their personal data. Also, I might not be qualified to be a professional Guinea pig, at least if you ask my friend Jane.

Jane is a wonderful writer. Her newsletter, Beyond, features interviews with big-ass literary names like Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed, and George Saunders. In an analog world, Jane would be hobnobbing with the literati, her name would be on some prestigious short-list, and her work would be in bookstores. In that same analog world, I’d be writing Situation Normal for a daily newspaper in exchange for a salary, healthcare, and a sweet retirement package.

But the analog world is dead. We live in a digital world, and somehow the internet gods—in their finite wisdom—connected me and Jane. Which is great! That’s the win.

In theory, all of this tech is supposed to make things easier for people like Jane and me. And when the tech works, it is easier! Because there’s no way I could print 4,500 copies of Situation Normal and mail them out every Sunday. My desktop publishing program would shit the bed, and after Christina unfucks that mess, the printer would jam. But the same tech that helps us reach our readers, also fucks with us on the regular.

Whenever the tech fucks with me, I call Christina. But whenever the tech fucks with Jane, she calls me. Over Christmas, I helped Jane unfuck a situation with an AI transcription tool so that she could get a clean transcript of one of her interviews. Jane called my tech skills “brilliant,” which struck me as absurd. Christina had a more realistic take: “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

The other night, the same AI tool went on the fritz. Jane called her tech support aka me. I promised Jane I’d help to the best of my ability, but we both knew that my abilities are as limited as the warranties on our phones.

I’ll spare you the details, but after thirty minutes of futzing with the AI, I couldn’t get it to work. That was the bad news. The good news was that I was able to replicate Jane’s issue.

“It’s not you,” I said. “There’s a bug.”

I didn’t tell Jane I was using the word “bug” to sound professional. I’m in no position to use the word bug the way tech people use it. For them, a bug is an issue to fix. For me, a bug is both an insect and an omnipresent reality of digital life. But I didn’t want to leave Jane hanging, so I suggested a workaround.

“Use your old transcription tool,” I suggested. “It’s not as buggy.”

Jane sighed. The old tool wasn’t as buggy, but its transcription was shit. In other words, it would probably work, but it definitely meant more work for Jane.

Ugh.

Jane told me she appreciated my help, but I felt bad.

“Tech support is supposed to solve the problem,” I told Christina later that night. “All I did was confirm that there is a problem.”

“That’s something,” Christina offered. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

Situation Normal recommends

This week, I’m recommending Jane Ratcliffe’s essay “Lullaby.” Here’s a snippet from Jane about the origins of this fantastic piece:

I’m sharing an essay that ran in The Huffington Post about getting divorced when I was still very much in love with my husband. I originally wrote the essay for the Up Front section of Vogue. It moved up through all the editors from whom I received beautiful, tearful praise. And then it hit the desk of Anna Wintour who was going through a divorce of her own and did not care for my still-in-love take on things. She killed it.

Read Jane’s essay here.

More Michael Estrin stories? Two books!

• Ride/Share: Micro Stories of Soul, Wit and Wisdom from the Backseat is a collection of my Lyft driver stories🚗🗣

• Not Safe for Work is a slacker noir novel based on my experiences covering the adult entertainment industry💋🍑🍆🕵️‍♂️

The ebook versions of my books are priced between 99 cents and $2.99, so if you don’t have the budget for a Situation Normal subscription, buying an ebook is a great way to support my work. Bonus: you’ll laugh your butt off!

Stick around and chat

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

1. The easy button was always a lie, right?

2. If there was a button that turned off the internet, would you press it? Be honest!

3. Why do printers suck so much, and do the engineers who make printers feel shame?

4. Am I the only one who misses CDs?

5. If the machines make us so efficient that we don’t need as many people to do the job, why aren’t there more people available to provide tech support when the machines shit the bed?

Last thing…

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Mortimer chilling on the couch while watching the new season of True Detective on our “smart” TV