Neither Rhyme Nor Reason: Et Tu, Technology?

Technology is always trying to thwart me.

Granted, I am the exact type of person technology can easily prey upon.

I have a history of hating two things, and they tend to go hand-in-hand. The first one is technology… and the second one is change.

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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I’m the person that takes 6 months to even open the box containing the MP3 player she received for her birthday.... the person that needed a friend to show her how to put songs from iTunes onto her iPod (oh my God… automatic versus manual syncing of songs is a concept that should not have taken me as long as it did)... the person who freaks out that she’s going to get a virus if she must download files or if the wrong button is pressed on her computer.

It took me a year or more to realize that my digital camera had video recording capability (and yes, I merely stumbled upon the fact one day. Such a fun serendipitous find… like discovering you randomly have $10 in your back jeans pocket).

I’ve owned a telescope for years that I got a couple Christmases ago, and I have literally never looked through it to observe a single star in the night sky. What’s holding me back? The instructional DVD explaining how it works.

In general, the instructional manuals are my stumbling blocks… my kryptonite, you might say. I just see the little booklet and before I can even attempt to read it, a little part of me dies inside.

It doesn’t help that I’m usually still quite attached to the object that I had to get rid of in order to replace it with the new fangled device that now requires me to read a volume of material just to understand how to turn it on. I am a great fan of the familiar.

My old mobile phone might be crap, but it’s my crap, and I know how it works and how to coax and cajole it so it does my bidding...eventually. The new cell phone looks foreign and unfriendly, and I have a feeling it is less than thrilled to be my guinea pig.

Pictured: my new iPhone

However, I must gather together all of my courage because there are two technological devices I must purchase soon because they desperately need to be updated and/or replaced: my mobile phone and my lap top.

(When your mobile phone constantly freezes up like a Windows 98 desktop computer and your lap top keeps overheating and shutting itself down multiple times in a day, I hear it’s a sign from the technology gods that their time on this earth has come full circle. Thanks, planned obsolescence. You’re a peach.)

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Pictured: planned obsolescence

You would think I would learn my lesson and just accept these inevitable shifts in the technological structure of the modern world… especially since I usually join the dark side eventually… only, of course, after a ridiculous amount of huffy resistance as well as an unhealthy dose of both inward and audible groaning.

Three examples of things that I foolishly considered mere “fads” that I was initially dead set against are as follows:

· Facebook

It took me a couple years to finally join after much coercion from family/friends. I refused to join something when the only good reason people kept giving me to do so was “everyone else has one.”

I was also convinced it would somehow steal my identity and/or lead to my eventual death by ninja assassins. I’m happy to report that it would now take the threat from a ninja assassin to convince me to deactivate said account.

· Texting

I could never understand why people would want to spend the time to painstakingly type out a detailed message to a person when they could simply press a button and call and/or leave a voice mail.

The only consistent answer I received from avid pro-texters for the reason they liked texting was: “sometimes you really just don’t want to talk to someone.” Receiving this response repeatedly led me to believe for an extended period of time that all “texters” were anti-social creeps who held an aversion for human voices and the voices of their own supposed “friends” in particular.

I now understand the convenience of being able to leave a quick message to someone when I am perhaps trapped in an environment where I cannot call… such as school or an appointment, etc. I would now probably need full-time therapy if someone told me I could no longer have texting on my phone.

· iPods

I think the reason I held out so long on joining the ipod craze – other than my insane need to be able to physically touch objects that I pay good money for… and thus my long time love affair with the more tangible CDs – was that I did not fully understand them. (Okay, who are we really kidding, I still don’t.)

When faced with a concept that is too confusing for my brain to process, it merely shuts down.

Kind of like my lap top.

Also, there was simply this rebellious part inside of me that refused to buy something simply because other people were buying it (or buy into a trend, see the above Facebook example).

It’s the same reason I refused to watch Avatar. Too much hype. Everyone said it was just soooo awesome…and maybe it is good, but 1) I doubt it will be great... how can it be now that you have jinxed it by building it up too much, 2) I'm so tired of hearing about it that I'm already sick of it, and 3) if I see the stupid trailer one more time I might snap. Also it is highly entertaining how much it annoys other people who loved the film when you tell them that you refuse to watch it based on principal. So, you know, bonus.