WTWT

I don't text or tweet, but if I did, I'd be way too frequently using this acronym I've just invented: WTWT: Wasting Time With Technology.

Lately I've been wasting time playing with blog site designs. Which is at least elective--product of my own whims and obsessions. But also: trying to figure out why the DVD recorder doesn't actually record. Or why it won't play a particular set of DVDs, won't even bring up the menus. Though they play happily on other machines.

But the biggest time wasters are in the normal course of navigating the net these days. We may have escaped the commercials on TV that seem to be entirely overtaking any other content, but recently they've become more ubiquitous and insistent online. Commercials that dance, that float and follow you, that send you to other sites if you brush your cursor over them to get somewhere else, that demand you close them or you can't see what you came to the site to see, except that they keep moving the place where you can click to close it.

Wasted time, as well as broken attention and frayed nerves from sites that load slowly or freeze up because of some new video or animation capability, which is only there for the commercials. And just the ads, cluttering up the pages, ads of the type that used to appear in tabloids and cheap magazines. Now they're everywhere.

Now I have a new printer I have to figure out how to hook up. It came with a power cord and a connector to the computer that are both absurdly too short to use. I can't even turn on my laptop without getting seven messages out of the ether about updates to this or that, so I am WTWT just fending off unwanted intrusions. Just to get to the spam, and the constant attacks for various nefarious purposes by invisible intruders from outer space, or at least Taiwan, Russia or for all I know, South Dakota.

WTF? WTWT.