Dear Friend and Reader:
Here is the best advice I’ve ever given myself about Mercury retrograde. I’ve noticed there is this pattern of ‘electronic things breaking down’ as so reputed by the literature and experience is often another thing entirely. Mercury is the trickster; that’s always good to remember when considering Mercury retrograde. Many things that seem to not be working actually are working fine, or the issue will work itself out without heroic intervention during the course of the retrograde and/or the station direct in about 22 days. In other words, wait rather than act.
Now it’s not always possible to do that; sometimes you need to fix or purchase something right away, but I would say if you really use your discernment you’ll notice that you might be able to use the old one, borrow one, or something else. Or, if you consider the problem carefully enough you will see that whatever it was is fine; or you discover that something else was the problem before you try to ‘fix’ the first thing that wasn’t really having an issue.
This works in the human realm too. Most people who didn’t reply to your email didn’t see it, or they got distracted and you don’t need to take it personally. So when in doubt, try one or two more methods of reaching someone and clarifying a potential issue. Find out what is really going on. But let’s stick to digital gear, which surrounds most of us to an utterly insane degree here in Western Civ.
I can give one recent example from many that I’ve experienced over the retrogrades. When I left on my trip to New England the other day, I brought along a new camera body, a Canon 50D. On the first day all of a sudden, I noticed that it was ‘producing bad CR2 files’. My laptop could not read the files; it read the ones created in the morning but not the ones from the evening. CR2s are files that contain the most data; you can open a 15mp file at 72mb and so you have a lot more data than just a .jpg and this kind of file is used by many photographers on the level of serious amateur or better, for that reason; so it’s an important function. The camera would write .jpgs, but not CR2s.