After a half hour on the phone, first trying to navigate voice mail and then another half hour with customer service (why, if I press 5 for tech support, am I sent to customer service?) and finally tech support, I learned something: my smartphone’s operating system was upgraded to the point where it no longer did what I wanted it to do.  The tech support gal wrapped it up nicely in jargon, but the upshot was that the phone was improved to the point where it erased what I had put in and ceased performing the function I used.

I thanked her out of reflex at the end of the call. She responded, “no problem,” always a fascinating retort to failure, and hoped she had met my expectations of excellent service. Sadly, she did.

Yesterday, my dear friend  Carolyn Elefant was forced to admit defeat at the hands of technology.  She had planned to do a free webinar on 21st Century Practice, but the 21st Century didn’t cooperate.

I am so, so sorry that I have had to cancel today’s free webinar on how to launch and lift a 21st Century Practice. The immediate cause of the cancellation is that the Anymeeting.com platform crashed – my assistant, more than 100 participants and I were locked out of the site. I’ll trash the service thoroughly in a minute.  But first, my own   mea culpa – ultimately, I stand responsible for the failure because I should have had a back up plan.

Carolyn took responsibility because that’s the type of person she is.  She, of course, was ready, willing and able to fulfill the duty she undertook.  Anymeeting.com failed her.  Ironic, obviously, but poignant in the lesson that a real person doesn’t blame the tools when things to awry.  Still, once one gets beyond the reluctance to rely on technology, one puts one’s fate in the hands of the binary gods.  They don’t always work, and aren’t always kind.

As I’ve heard from a lot of you over the past two days, SJ isn’t working. You can’t open a post, and it eventually times out.  As I learned recently from the people paid by GoDaddy to make excuses, the program that runs this blog is at “end of life,” which is the techie way of saying it’s going out of business. It didn’t stop them from taking my money, but that’s a different department. 

Nor, as it turned out, had they come up with a way for me to make a graceful exit, as the export feature developed for their program could only handle a limited amount of data. I exceeded that amount. By a lot.  They have since come up with a “work-around,” techie jargon for it never occurred to us it would be a problem, so this is our band-aid,

The problem is being worked on as I type (and I am NOT asking for anyone’s advice, so please DO NOT tell me what you think I should do), but there is a fair potential that one day in the not to distant future SJ, and all its contents, will disappear from the face of the internet, existing only in Google cache and the archives of the Library of Congress.

But all of this makes a point that digital natives, technology lovers and fools fail to see. We are putting our lives in the hands of others and they may not treat it as respectfully as we would like.  It’s not a matter of their not trying hard, or having good technology per se, but the external practicalities of the digital age. 

What do you plan to do when a company that holds your content in the clouds shuts its doors because it’s not making enough money to survive?  What will you say to the developers who decide that the apps you absolutely require aren’t the ones they think worthy of saving?  What if an app you’re counting on runs slow, or twitchy, or just plain fails?  Call up customer service and complain?  There is nothing they can do. They don’t want it to fail any more than you do. So how does “we’re working on it” with no ETA in your lifetime work for you?

I responded to Carolyn that my yPad always works. It wasn’t a helpful response, but I did it to make a point. We are slaves to technology.  You are likely more of a slave than I am, but I’m a slave too.  Tech is the tools of the trade these days, but having used it for the past 20 something years, I have seen it come and go, arrive with great fanfare and disappear in silence.  Most of the kids haven’t, and can’t conceive of it ever happening. It happens, and when it does, it smacks you in the face.  You came to rely on it, to expect it to be there every time you turn something on, and then whamo, it’s gone. No word. No warning. Just gone one day.

When I started practicing law, I expected the companies with which I did business to be around for me.  And for a long time, they were. The idea that they would pop up one day and disappear the next, leaving me in the lurch, was unthinkable.  It’s changed since then. Most of the companies are still around, but in an evolved form. Not necessarily evolved for the better, but evolved for their benefit. And in the process, the things that made them reliable for me have evolved as well to the point of indifference.

For you digital natives, this probably won’t mean much. You’ve been trained to expect to have to reprogram your phone every six months to accommodate the next new OS. You expect “end of life,” obsolescence, failure. You take it in stride, as if that’s how the world is supposed to work. Computers are disposable items like diapers, and you don’t mind paying a lot of money for the next shiny toy.

But one day, you’re going to be like me, or Carolyn, and find that your gods have abandoned you. What do you plan to do then?  Reflexively say “thank you” to some excuse-making drone who responds, “no problem”?  Because, my dear friends, it is a problem. It’s a big problem.