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Hello, my name is Nance – and I am a techno-dummy.
“Hi, Nance. Welcome to the group.” That response would be a lot more comforting if the group it was coming from consisted of more than three people – two of whom are only members because they’ll gladly sign-up for membership in any organization that has regular meetings and free coffee – their idea of a social night out.
I have always been a techno-dummy. Being a “woman of a certain age”, it would be easy to attribute my abject dumminess to having grown up in an era when a “TV remote control device” was the youngest kid in a household – the one who was instructed to sit within reach of the channel-changing knob, ready and able to reach out and actually TOUCH it when instructed to do so by Dad-on-the-couch.
But even as a kid myself, I was always reluctant to accept the advances in technology that intruded on my world. The change from telephone exchanges that had sweet-sounding names like Juniper-6 and Evergreen-8 to militaristic-sounding three-digit numbers – preceded by area codes and followed by extension numbers – was only the beginning of an inescapable nightmare of “operators standing by” who turned out to be robotic voices demanding I press pound NOW – or face consequences I was far too timid to imagine.
In later years, my first foray into computerdom was fraught with trepidation. I ventured into WordPerfect with the same enthusiasm most people reserve for their first encounter with root canal – ever mindful of the fact that it “needed to be done”, the attendant excruciating pain notwithstanding.
All this being said, I have now met my technological Waterloo – a.k.a. “The Blackberry”.
Convinced by diabolical friends who are already members of the BB cult (and ever on the prowl to bring fresh blood into their inner circle), I purchased the sensuously smooth-to-the-touch, innocuous-looking device a month ago, mesmerized into believing that it really WAS necessary for people to be able to reach me 24-7, whether I welcomed it or not – lest I be caught on my subway commute to work, or picking cantaloupes at the grocery store, bereft of the need to check for incoming messages like your average brain surgeon, whose skills warrant being in the loop and at-the-ready on a minute-to-minute basis.
However, a mere four weeks in, I do hereby admit complete defeat. It was Nance v BB from the start – and the BB won, hands down. And this is not an easy admission from a girl who once mastered the Etch-A-Sketch in a single afternooon - and took pride in the accomplishment.
My Adventures in BlackBerryland so far …
I cannot make a simple phone call – well, I can, eventually – but not before I have somehow managed to inadvertently contact at least six people in Long Distance Land who never knew me – and probably wouldn’t want to. I am also convinced that I am now under surveillance by the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security for having sent text messages that were meant to say “let’s meet for a drink at The Duke”, but somehow came out as “the code for releasing US nuclear weapons is as follows …”
As Norma Desmond would have stated, had she lived in this day and age, “It’s not the messages that got small, it’s the keyboards that got small.” And, as a result, I recently told a sick friend not to “get better” but to “fuck off” – amazing what havoc a slip of a too-long fingernail can wreak in the world in which we now live.
Perhaps it’s just a matter of too much too – well, just TOO much. My BB affords (or so I am told) a myriad of handy-dandy options that I have yet to understand or use – at least deliberately.
I know I have now taken a few hundred photographs with my BB – and if I ever figure out how to access them, I will undoubtedly be fascinated by my inadvertent capture of important moments in time – like that photo of the floor of a streetcar as I was attempting to phone the office to say I’d be late, or that image of the back of someone’s head as I stood in line at the box office, trying to text a friend as to their whereabouts when we’d agreed to meet at the Cineplex for the eight o’clock show.
I am given to understand that my BB is also equipped with a video function – and I have not given up the idea that my “Woman with a BlackBerry” film-noir (which I’m sure is IN there, somewhere) will be a Cannes Film Festival winner in future – once I have learned how to (a) retrieve it, and (b) engage the “Award-Winning Film Editing” program that is undoubtedly available somewhere between the “Please Change My Life’s Destiny” and “I Just Need TO BE LISTENED TO” programs already available on my cute-as-a-button hand-held device.
This diatribe was not meant to be an attack on the good people of BlackBerryWorld – whose intentions, I am sure, are aimed at the betterment of the universe through increased access to communication.
It is more a shout-out to those who, like me, are technophobes of the first order – those of us too stupid to answer the call of the future – which, by the way, can be set to vibrate, a “classic” ring tone, or a jazz/blues-with-disco-overtones rendition of “Hail to the Chief”.
As for me, I’m going to sit here with my BlackBerry for the next few hours – “dialing” Beekman-6 over and over, with the hope that someone – not a recording, nor an amazing facsimile of a human voice, but a real live person – answers the call.
Hope springs eternal – and if that hope is an option on my BB, I HOPE I figure out how to use it before the night is out.
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