Angry Story

Faulty technology. It’s a dastardly monster. Maybe I’m asking too much from my technology since it fills my life with ease 99% of the time. That may be, but when technology becomes an obstacle instead of an aide it still really fucking sucks.

I knew that I needed to create marketing materials for Two Rooms back in February when I was asked to be in charge of PR. Due to the male lead not being solidified until the end of June, third time’s the charm, I wasn’t able to start my work until mid July (this is because pictures of the leads were going to dominate most of my design).

Now you might be thinking, it’s not my technology’s fault that I wasn’t able to start on my project until late in the game. You’d be right in that assumption, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the faulty program in which I was working.

Canva has been a lifesaver for me many times in the past since I don’t come from a graphic design background. It makes creating posters and other marketing materials a breeze… most of the time.

For the marketing materials I was creating, I needed to have the same design fit multiple formats. This basically means that I needed to create the design in multiple different sizes, which normally isn’t a problem.

The problem was the way the program reacted to the design I was creating. Say that I messed something up in my design and needed to hit undo. I go and hit undo and that should be the end of it. Instead, it undos the last action AND decides to horizontally flip the object I’m working on. This consequently made every single undo a royal pain.

I worked around this obstacle to the best of my ability and everything was still trucking along fine. Then one day, Canva pushed me past my breaking point.

I was working on resizing the design once again. I was almost done with what I was working on, but I made a mistake so I hit undo. Instead of undoing the last action and flipping the item horizontally, which I had grown accustomed to, it decided to delete the item entirely. I hit redo in a panic and another item deleted. I hit undo again and yet another item disappeared from the document. I went back and forth between hitting undo and redo in a frenzy until somehow all of the items were deleted off of the page. I tried to refresh, but the document had automatically saved after all of the deletions had been made.

I stared at the blank document on screen in total shock and outrage. Profanities spewed from my mouth and I begrudgingly restarted my project.

I know that I am not alone. I’ve heard tales of people working on documents that their computers didn’t save, of files getting corrupted, or of files going missing. It’s not our faults that the technology malfunctioned and hell who can even blame the technology for getting it wrong every now and then. Regardless, it leaves many people wondering whether or not it’s worth it to actually throw your computer against the wall and to that I say a solid maybe.