One of my first memories is standing next to a large, boxy record player and watching a huge, red, vinyl Babar The King record spin round and round, filling the room with gloomy hunter-killing-Babar’s-mother music. I grew up listening to my music on a different record player, a clunky, wooden Telefunken radio, and later, when I was about 7, a tiny transistor radio with one earplug. By high school I’d graduated to a white, plastic hi-fi/stereo, but today, I listen on my iPod Nano, Bose Wave radio, Sirius/XM radio (in my car), my computer, or. sometimes still, our old turntable.
I guess this makes me a tech-lover, but the problem with all this tech-loving is my 1948-engineered brain. The poor thing gets easily overwhelmed and challenged by the daily struggles I torture myself with as I try to master each new device I buy, thanks to planned obsolescence. Lately, I feel like I’m drowning in technology overload as I’m pulled under after each laboriously self-taught failure at instant mastery. This weekend I spent way too much of my time trying to tread water as I tried and retried to upgrade and re-configure.
I’m exhausted from this latest dive into the vast sea of gadget obsolescence after buying both a new Apple Airport Express base station (don’t even ask me to figure out how to get iTunes to come out of it) and a new point-and-shoot digital camera (I broke my old one last week). I had to re-learn all the ins and outs of pointing and shooting and reconfiguring Internet and printing preferences (tech support wasn’t answering the phone). Let’s just say I fumbled and bumbled my way through.
What upsets me is how big my learning curve grows, how much older I get, and how much vaster my gaps of ignorance are. My brain is packed to the gills with passwords and preferences, so I shouldn’t be surprised when I cannot, for the life of me, remember whether or not I turned off the water to the outside faucet so it doesn’t freeze and burst our pipes. There’s no more room at this inn, is there?
Today my daughter emailed me using her new Google phone. She said she wasn’t sure how to use it, yet, because there was so much new information to download into her formerly cellphone-based (with texting thrown in) storage depot brain. If she’s only 28 and she’s experiencing tech-brain drain, what are my chances of surviving?
Oh, all you Holiday celebrators out there – just make me an angel that flies to Montgomery and we’ll call it a day.
2 comments:
It's hard!!! Ok but playing itunes will not happen for you because you need to hook up the speakers to the airport express and you have no speakers. Also just to make you feel better I have tried maybe 50 passwords to get into my old email account and I can't figure out which one it is. Also I just changed it only a month ago. SAD!!!
Nice column Sharron!
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