Technophobia Or Techno-apathy

Ann: I don’t understand why some people refuse to learn anything at all about technology. Being a technophobe these days can be a real handicap.

Pam: Since I still can’t get the internet to work on my laptop, I have to assume that comment is directed at me.

Ann: Not entirely. At least you can find your way around email, cell phones, text messages, and digital cameras. I’m talking about people who truly fear this stuff. You don’t qualify as having technophobia.

Pam: That’s true. But I think there needs to be a new term. I don’t fear technology. I just have a passionate disinterest in it. I guess you’d call it techno-apathy.

Ann: Well you’d think you’d at least learn the basics through osmosis. You’re surrounded by it all the time.

Pam: This is going to make you nuts, but I actually find myself making an effort to resist a lot of that stuff. When someone mentions routers, servers, or operating systems I stick my fingers in my ears and mutter loudly, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!”

Ann: But why expend energy to intentionally not learn something useful? Just don’t resist it and you’d get a good basic knowledge of it all.

Pam: Look we’re a couple of smart cookies here. We’re capable of learning anything we’d like. Isn’t there some subject that you could learn about easily but for some reason you just don’t want to.


Ann: Yeah...finance. “I don’t care” doesn’t begin to describe it. I find myself going out of my way to avoid anything to do with it. At our age, whenever you get a group together, especially if some of them are men, the talk inevitably turns to 401K plans, IRA’s, rollovers, mutual funds, and the dreaded retirement options.

Pam: That stuff’s not so bad—certainly not to a “fingers-in-the-ears la, la, la” level.

Ann: Well at least I can put my financial plans in motion and then just pretty much forget them for a year. Technology is something you have to deal with every day.

Pam: The operative words being “deal with”. It seems to me that technology creates as many headaches as it solves.

Ann: You just remember the times when it made you nuts and forget when it worked smoothly.

Pam: When did it ever work smoothly?! Sometimes the simplest way is the best. For example, I was driving to Wichita with two male coworkers this week. They were in the front seats with all their gadgets, pulling their hair out trying to get the portable satellite radio they brought along to work through the rental car’s speakers.


Ann: Well that’s not technology’s fault. Obviously they were doing something wrong.

Pam: Sure, but the result’s the same. They were totally aggravated. Then when they realized they weren’t going to be able to listen to several hundred miles of Blue Collar Comedy, much to my relief, they decided to listen to an iPod one of them had. So for another fifty miles they fought with power cords and the iTrip transmitter and never did get it going.

Ann: Again, it was operator error. You can’t blame the tools.

Pam: At one point one of them looked over his shoulder into the back seat to apologize for the lack of entertainment. I told him, “Don’t worry about it. My book is working just fine!”

Ann: Obviously it wasn’t an e-book, huh?

Pam: Wait, it gets better….So we have a flat and we stop by the side of the road to put the spare on. But they’re having all kinds of trouble seeing underneath the back end of the car where you’re supposed to use this little tool to lower the spare down.

Ann: This is about technology?

Pam: Yeah…since they couldn’t get their heads in the space under the car to see where to attach the tool to crank down the spare, they pulled out their phones and tried to take pictures of the mechanism.

Ann: Pretty creative if you ask me.

Pam: Except they couldn’t get enough light and they couldn’t figure out how to turn on the flash. Then when they finally figured the flash out, they couldn’t get the angle right and kept taking pictures of the wrong place.


Ann: So how’d they get it?

Pam: After listening to them squabble about how to do it, I finally reached in my purse and pulled out a compact from my make up bag. I flipped it open and used the mirror to slip the tool right into place and lowered the spare.

Ann: Well aren’t you a regular Mrs. MacGyver. So if they locked the keys in the car, would you pull out a bobby pin and pick the lock?

Pam: If I was Mrs. MacGyver, I’d use a tube sock and a garlic press to get my darn internet to work on my laptop.

Ann: If you’d just check your proxy settings like I told you then…

Pam: La, la, la. I can’t hear you!