Technology and I seem have a love-hate relationship and always have. But before I get started, let me give a little background information. I was born in 1970, a unique time in history, at the bridge that connects two eras, and I have a foot planted on each side of the bridge. It was just after the moon landing, but before the age of calculators, cassette tapes, and personal computers. In spite of the social upheaval of the 60's and 70's, it was still a world much like the one in which my parents grew up, whereas my children were born into a completely different world. We watched a black and white TV with an antenna that brought us 3 channels which turned to snow when we ran the vacuum or the mixer, and played the National Anthem just before it shut off at 11pm. Sometimes we had to hold the antenna just right to get good reception and we frequently had to adjust the vertical hold so that the picture didn't roll. Our telephone was tied to the wall by a cord and we had a party line so we could listen to our neighbors phone conversations. When we took pictures we waited at least a week to get them back from the developer, crossing our fingers that we got some good ones, and our "delete" button was the trash can. We reheated leftovers in the oven or on the stove top, and we listened to vinyl records. My Disney "videos" were books with pictures and a record player that let out a ding when it was time to turn the page.
By the time I went to college, we had a computer lab where we could type our papers on a black and white screen, save them to a floppy disk and print them on a dot matrix printer, but typewriters were still widely used and just a few short years later my husband was taking classes online over the internet. So the world my children were born into is one where you can record your show and skip the commercials, pause it for a bathroom break, and even rewind it if you missed something they said. If we missed a show we had to watch the TV Guide for the rerun. They were born knowing how to insert their games into the cd-rom drive and start their programs. They never had the benefit of an obnoxious brother making kissing noises into the phone on the other line, having to comb through dusty old scientific journals at the library to do a research paper, or being able to recite all the jingles learned from the ads on TV. They have very little experience with the concept of a world without video games, cell phones, the internet, streaming videos, cable tv, itunes, SIRI, etc.
So here I am, a child of both worlds stuck in the computer age, married to a geek who imposes all the new, everchanging technology on me, claiming it will make our lives better, when mostly all it does is frustrate me and complicate my life.
Growing up, my dad owned his own business so I had a PC in my home from about the age of 15. I typed my research papers on it, and while the concept of being able to edit my writing right there on the computer rather than having to write and rewrite and again rewrite each draft by hand seemed like a good one, but in practice it didn't quite live up to my expectations. Any one with a computer knows that they often don't do what they are supposed to. My dad would tell me "computers don't do anything that you dont tell them to," but I'm pretty convinced they just hate me. Typing a paper on the computer always took as much time as it would if I just wrote the darn thing by the time I rebooted several times, lost my document at least once, and then cried in frustration when it refused to print.
Today, my husband has finally quit telling me that if my computer isn't doing what I tell it to, it's my fault. He has witnessed countless occasions when my computer did whatever it wanted, without any consideration for my feelings on the matter. For example, randomly reformatting my document right in the middle of a page and then refusing to re-reformat for me, forcing me to reload the program and start again. My laptops quit working every year or so, and its not because I click on phishing emails or download viruses (I know better thanks to my resident network security geek), and my phone dials random people I haven't talked to in years from my purse.
We lived in Germany for a few years in the 90's and we got around the old fashioned way - with maps. I have a great sense of direction and am very good with maps (maybe due to that fact that I grew up with a dad who was a land surveyor and civil engineer), and I always rode in the passenger seat as the navigator. We got along just fine. Fast forward to 2005, when we again lived in Germany. My husband insisted on buying a $400 GPS that would do my job, which I was willing to do for free, but I just couldn't compete with all her buttons and sexy British accent. I named her "Leah" and called her his "ugly wife," Maybe it was my attitude, but for some reason Leah hated me. When I would touch the power button, she made this growling noise, but only for me. She never did it to anyone else. More than once her directions took me to a dead end or a parking lot, and once she even tried to drive me off a bridge. I'm pretty sure she tried to kill me more than once. Many times she got us lost and then I would have to get out the map and try and figure out where we were and where we were going and get us there the old fashioned way.
Even now, I prefer to look things up on a map before I go in case the GPS screws up and takes me to the wrong place, which happens more often than it should, and I always write things down on paper, in case the computer "loses" it. And although I have to admit to using the internet to look up the map, I have to wonder, are we really better off?
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