I’m TOO Old For This

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I cooked fried eggs on our new stove in our newly remodeled kitchen yesterday. Not as easy as it sounds. Technology thumbed its nose at me and leaped ahead with something called a radiant cooktop. A shiny, oblong black glass surface sits on my counter with several round holes painted on the top. The cook (me) is supposed to center a pan on one of the prescribed holes and push a spot marked on/off. Mind you, there’s no actual button–pushing the spot becomes a matter of faith. I figured out how to make it work, and the eggs were certainly edible, but I’m not sure I was happy about it. I have had a long and uneasy relationship with Advancing Technology.  

Years ago, our family was one of the first in the neighborhood to have an Atari gaming system. My husband, a software designer, brought one home for the kids. From my point of view, it was just one more thing for my six sons to fight over (which they did regularly with great enthusiasm). I was somewhat taken aback when a couple of years later, Son #6, my FIVE-YEAR-OLD, came in as one of the top winners in his age category at a national traveling Nintendo competition. (Now, he makes his living designing software at 4 or 5 times the salary with which I retired after almost 25 years of teaching.)

And I clearly remember the day Son #5 bought me my first cell phone—it was a Mother’s Day gift. “What the heck am I going to do with this?” I recall thinking. He assured me it would make my life much easier. Since I’ve always had a soft spot for Son #5 because he’s the only one of my children I can never remember having screamed “No” at me, I smiled and said, “Thank you.” But truthfully, it didn’t take long to convert me. Once my husband discovered he could contact me anywhere from our home landline, he no longer felt the need to have me paged over the loudspeaker at the bank, library or grocery store (yes, this happened SEVERAL TIMES), so he could pass on whatever random bit of information that had popped to the top of his head. It was then that I began to see the advantage of what I had heretofore dismissed as just another appliance designed to increase the S&P 500’s price of AT&T stock. It took a year or two, but now, if I can’t find my phone, I am prone to a full-on panic attack!

However, the place that pushed my “new technology” anxiety over the edge was my employment. I took a full-time teaching job when I was well into my 40s. (The 20 or so years before that I had spent running an  asylum for eight bright but very unruly short people.) Virtually all the 20-year-old teachers around me had had extensive training in how to use computer technology to their advantage in the classroom. I started college when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were TEN years old (odd they were born in the same year, don’t you think?). When I had finished college, using a film projector was considered “high tech”. (And yes, I can splice a broken piece of film very nicely with scotch tape, thank you.)

Naturally, one of the classes I was assigned was journalism—the school newspaper–Which Used Computers! A lot of computers. So I told my students the truth—I knew a great deal about writing a good news story; I’d even been on BYU’s newspaper staff writing feature stuff for the music department. But laying out a newspaper with technology? Totally beyond me. (The principal never mentioned how desperate she must have been to hire me, or I might have thought twice about taking the job.)

My students rose to the occasion. They taught me the differences between Apple and PC, showed me how to format columns, choose pleasing fonts for headlines, insert photos, layout ads, etc. And in return, I taught them how to write. A couple of those kids are now professional journalists. It’s my pleasure to regularly read what they write. (And when I do, I never fail to have a rush of gratitude for their astonishing generosity. Most kids are far better people than the media would like us to believe.)

So you are probably thinking to yourself, well, you must have learned something since you are writing this on a computer. Good point. But since I’m a Baby Boomer and had to learn the technology by the “hunt and peck” method, I never have any line of reference for a problem I haven’t seen before–like a couple of months ago when I hit a wrong key and my text began to write on top of itself—which I didn’t even know was possible. The next time Son #4 came by the house, I showed him the problem. “Hmmm,” he said and began to type into his phone. Five minutes later, he waved a magic wand over my keyboard, and it worked again!

“Wow!” I said to his wife, who was sitting nearby. “Thanks for letting him take the time to figure out my problem.”

She laughed out loud. “You hardly ever ask him for help. My parents call him from Southern Utah a couple of times a week with technology questions!” Boom! There’s a reason they call us Baby Boomers!