Recently I have been getting very frustrated with my phone and computer technology. They keep upgrading and making matters worse. I know you know what I mean. After every upgrade some key programs or settings get changed and it takes forever to figure out what happened.

To add to my frustrations, I switched out my old iPhone 7 for a newer iPhone XR yesterday, thinking I was doing a wise thing. Well, maybe. It may turn out to have been wise but in the mean time I have been downloading and re-setting all sorts of applications and synchronizing with my laptop.

Then I found that I had an abundance of drives on my computer. I had Google Drive and WD drive (now deleted) and something-else-whose-name-I-have-forgotten-drive. It may have been Chrome or Apple or something beginning with i. Anyway, it was all taking up too much space.

Synchronizing (or, ‘syncing’) is not working as well as I would like, so I have been messing around with the settings on my photo collection to try to keep it up-to-date with the iCloud collection because iCloud is a bit stubborn and slow about sharing. Added to that, I found now that photos in iCloud are stored in heic format, but they are in jpeg format on my MacBook and my new phone is spitting them out as png format. Don’t hold your breath, but I think I may have got that sorted now, even though it took a while to figure it out.

So, given all these technical woes, I assumed that the problem with my outdoor security camera must be technical in nature. It was showing clear images during the day but blurry images at night. I went to the settings and fiddled with them for a while but the problem persisted. And, it didn’t seem to make any sense because I could see the lamp on the garage wall quite clearly but the driveway was just a grey blur.

Last night I went online and had a long chat with the security system’s chat person. She rebooted the system and for a moment we thought that had solved the problem, but then right away I just saw a blur again. I wondered if there was a wiring problem or frost on the lens, and the chat person suggested I clean the camera and get back to her the next day.

This morning I went outside to see if there was any obvious indication of what the problem might be, and much to my surprise, there was! It was not technical in the least.

When the camera was installed the installer failed to remove a small strip of protective plastic from around the edge of the camera. That little piece of plastic had come loose and the wind was blowing it about in front of the camera lens. That is what I was looking at on my screen.

All of my focus on technical problems had led me to assume that this must be just another in the same vein, so I had a chuckle at myself when I realized that the problem was so mundane. No program problems. No synching problems. No wiring problems. No drive problems. Just a little piece of wayward plastic. Now that is something I know how to fix!