Techno Greek

Now that my children are gone, I have decided to become a foster parent for tech savy teens. That way I will have an onsight consultant to guide me through the rapidly advancing technology that so overwhelms and baffles me.

It is pitiful when you are so far behind the times you have to send an e-mail to your daughter-in-law and ask her how to do something on the computer. That is just what I had to do when I decided to embed a photo in my blog.

I have no idea how I even got the photo to the blog. I just kept doing stuff over and over and suddenly it appeared. I was a bit uncertain I would even have any success because Kim, my daughter-in-law, began her reply with "easy". Boy, if that isn't a red flag!! "Danger! Danger Will Robinson!"

It is all Greek to me. I come from a time when a blackberry was something you picked in the summer and ate with cream and sugar. When I was in college a computer room housed only the computer -- a monstrosity of a machine three or four times larger than my dorm room -- not desks full of laptops. We had bites back then. Mosquito bites. Dog bites. A bite of food. The net was what you caught fish with and the only website we had was the one in the corner of the living room made by a pesky spider.

Whenever the neighbor's sons come over to play with Will's old Ninetendo I am in fear and dread that I will have to call him at college and ask him how to get the television back to television mode. I have a two year old cell phone for the simple reason I haven't yet learned how to use all of its functions. About the second day I had the phone Jim and I went to see a movie and I had to borrow a teen from another mother to show me how to turn it off in the theater.

Reading the instructions is generally no help to me because they are written in the vernacular of technology. If they had words and phrases like 'thingy dooley' and 'little square thing' and 'squiggly line' I might have a fighting chance of learning how to use the 'whatchamacallit'.

On our last move we bought a new condo. A new condo comes with new appliances. I have learned how to use everything. I had to. Eating is a matter of survival. I guess when your life depends on it, you can learn something new.