I have a cloud. I know, because every time I tell my computer to save something it asks me “do you wish to save this on your cloud?” My computer knows just about everything. Almost as much as my grandchildren. Exactly where my cloud is remains a mystery. On these beautiful warm winter days there’s not a cloud in the sky.
I think I may have drifted into the new stage of life called “electronic overload”. My fingers no longer cope with the small buttons on cell-phones and those other new-fangled phones with keyboards. They are called smart-phones, which means you have to be smart to use one. Walk around the lobby at the retirement home and you will see residents trying to make a phone call. The experts are the care givers.
At the computer, which used to be my friend and ally, my mind no longer knows what I have to do to copy and paste, delete or save a file. I spend hours looking for things that I used to find at the click of a mouse.
To counter all these difficulties I have set up my own personal ‘help-desk’ system and staffed it with grandchildren, the Golden Ager’s last resort in times of electronic need. Grand-children are born knowing everything. I recently spend three entire days trying to copy a picture from the internet. To no avail. I tried everything, ‘save all’, ‘left-click’, ‘right-click’, and any other combination of electronic commands that I could think of. The computer screen glared at me and never twitched a muscle.
At 6 pm on the third day grandson number 4 dropped into say hello or check on us – I’m never sure of the motives behind such visits. He threw the standard teenager’s greeting at me, “Hey, Pop, Wassup?” and stood looking at me in my scrunched up fetal position in front of the computer. “I’m trying save this picture,” I explained. He leaned over my shoulder and with his left hand casually clicked and flicked the mouse a couple of times and said, “There, you have it now in My Pictures.” Why didn’t I think of trying with my left hand? I guess that my case of overload may be worse than I thought.
I tried paying a bill for the car license over the phone the other day and had to call in another grandchild to come over and finish the job. That was after I sat holding the receiver in my hand and looking at the phone for the best part of an hour. In the hi-tech haze I could swear that I had been talking to an electronic person. My grandson probably knows her…
I concede that I’ve lost the race that I was enjoying – me against the advance of 0technology. I was ahead of them for years, always full of new ideas and exciting concepts. Now the new stuff flashes past at ever increasing speed leaving me floundering in its wake. I can manage my computer as I always did and I seldom try anything new unless there’s a grandchild within easy call.
On the other hand, I’m pretty good at history. I was there when much of it happened…
