There's no excuse for me being here. If my I.D. had been checked before moving to this community, I would have been denied entry for two reasons: lack of a PhD. and lack of Internet expertise. I am a self defined techno dino and I'm okay with it. I live in the Silicon Valley.
Bumping my way along in several programs is do-able. Drop me into PhotoShop and I loose my mind with all the choices and tweaking. I suffer from both A.D.D. and perfectionism so programs such as these are my worst nightmare. More choices crammed on a screen than humanly possible to take in, along with innumerable options that leave me with an incomplete project; but I could still airbrush this hair off the dog's tooth! Impossible to complete anything. What I've learned to do instead is take really great photos that require little touching up or getting over the fact that a photo didn't turn out as well as I wished it had.
Unfortunately, my family is just as enamoured as I am about learning how to be more tech savy. This translates as, don't worry, mom will take care of it. No one in the family would ever dare verbalize this but here's the most recent case in point.
We were headed to Sacramento so I brought up a Google Map for directions. So far, so good. We had a three hour drive so I thought it would be best to print the directions. I'd bought a Wi-Fi printer (yes, I do know some things) so I hit 'print' and went to the next room to grab the paper. Nothing was happening with the printer. It sat completely idle. I played around with the printer for a bit and then when back to my laptop to see what the screen read. 'Ink levels low. Replace ink cartridges.' What? I just replaced the cartridges two weeks ago. That can't be right. So I cancelled the print job and tried again. And again. Okay, one more time. Finally, I turned to my kids who were laying across the family room couches watching cartoons. Neither had said a thing while I stomped back and forth from the office to the lap top. "Have either of you guys had any problems with the printer?" I asked.
"Yeah," my daughter volunteered.
"It's not working," my son interjected.
"You guys knew this?" I asked.
"Yeah," the chorus returned.
"How long have you known?" I asked the air.
"Oh, I don't know, it's been about a week," my daughter said.
"Why didn't someone say something?!" I said, feeling my forehead warm.
"I dunno," my son said sheepishly.
"You guys! You were just going to leave it like this?" I said. And as the words escaped my mouth, it occurred to me that my words were a 'copy, paste' of what happens whenever a piece of technical machinery goes down in our house.
Right off the top of my head, we have an iPod, an MP3 player, a DVD player, a laptop, and a camera - that are ALL collecting dust somewhere because they don't work. No one has taken the time to figure out the problems or had the incentive to get any of these fixed. Even though, at some point, these pieces of 'must haves' dictated every breath of whether a family member could go on. Makes ya wonder.