My Love Hate Relationship With Technology

When I was in college, all sophomores had to take an interdisciplinary course called "Society, Ethics and Technology." This class consisted of once a week torturous lectures in which, in order to prove you were in the room with 999 other sophomores, we (a) had to sit with our class like a third grade assembly and (b) had to turn in these short "essays" that basically boiled down to "write a summary that proves you were in the lecture. It was sport for my friends and I to try and get these essays done as fast as possible once the lecture began so we could get out as fast as possible. The class also had a once a week recitation session where, in groups of 25 or so, we pretended to care enough about the topic of the week that we wouldn't lose "participation" points.

This class was terrible for many reasons. Not the least of which was that our recitation professor made us all keep nametags on our desks as if to demonstrate how little he cared about who we actually were. But the worst part was the overall theme of the class. To sum up: Technology is bad. We cannot trust the scientists and doctors and engineers to control it themselves because they are all a little power mad. In order to save the world, we must all be weary of technological advances. As a biology major, computer nerd and gadget geek I took offense to this.

Until now.

Now, I hate technology.

It's a recent development based mainly on two things:
1) I'm living at my parents' and we only have a very slow dial up internet connection and I feel vaguely lost and disoriented.

2) My previous employer, a university, shut down my e-mail account without any warning and I lost all kinds of e-mails that were stored on the server and now that I've convinced them to turn it on for 24 hours, I can't get access to the webmail site to forward all my mail to myself.

Oh, and my cell phone is acting up.