The other day my phone stopped working. “Solar flares could have caused a computer glitch,” the phone company told me. “We’ve had hundreds of people with this problem.”

Solar flares? I Googled it and sure enough a solar flare had occurred. The sun has been in an inactive period of sleep, according to the article I found. It is becoming more active now and we can expect more interruptions to technology as it awakens.

We now have something to blame for everything that goes wrong, something that we can’t do anything about.

Years ago, a large solar flare caused all sorts of chaos, even burning up a telegraph. Now, however, we have a whole lot more gadgets to worry about than we did back in the 1800’s.

We’ve been having problems with our TV satellite at my house. As it turns out, it’s a bad cable and some incorrect connections in the wiring. But we could easily say a solar flare was to blame.

We couldn’t get the laptop and iPad to connect to the internet, Two hours on the phone with technical support fixed the problem. We still are not sure what caused it in the first place other than messing with the Wi-Fi connection while moving furniture — or perhaps a solar flare.

Come to think of it, we’ve had a lot of odd problems lately. For example, the refrigerator went on the blink and started making a noise. The repairman said the fan went bad. But we know what really caused it, don’t we?

And the hard drive on my computer crashed a few weeks ago too. Remember what happened to the telegraph? Maybe it was a hardware failure like the computer guy said, or maybe it was caused by a solar flare.

Do you suppose a solar flare zapped the timer on my coffee pot and made it run over the other morning? That was quite a mess. I thought coffee pots had an automatic shut off feature when you forget to put the pot under the drip. I would like to think that something caused it other than my inattentiveness.

Come to think of it, nearly everything is run by a computer these days and computers are very susceptible to glitches caused by solar flares.

Window won’t roll down on the car? Burned out mechanical part or solar flare?

Remote control quit working and a new battery won’t fix it? It’s not due to age and worn out parts. Blame it on a solar flare.

Can’t get into the bank account online? Routine maintenance, my eye! They were struck by a solar flare and didn’t want to admit their system was compromised.

Email not working right? I thought I simply needed to upgrade to a newer version. Now I’m beginning to wonder if the upgrade has anything to do with something else, like a you-know-what.

No telling what could happen: traffic lights failing, planes crashing, elevators getting stuck, air conditioners quitting when its a hundred degrees outside, dishwashers stopping in mid-cycle, and, worst of all, the remote control for the television set could quit working.

Unfortunately, as I said before, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot any one can do about it except worry, and why worry about something we can’t do anything about?

Besides, I just saw in the news that a comet will be passing the earth and showering us with meteorites. Meteorites will probably do us in before the solar flares have a chance.

I only hope the meteorites don’t crash through the roof. It is already leaking from the spring storms and crazy weather caused by what-I’m-tired-of-talking-about.

I’m really happy that scientists found solar flares to blame for all of my problems. It is getting where the “computer malfunction” excuse is so overused that no one believes that one anymore.

Copyright 2011 Sheila Moss