For The Love Of Technology

Pam: My boss Archie changes cell phones like I change earrings. He just got the latest and greatest. The leather case I ordered for his last phone hasn’t even arrived yet!

Ann: He loves technology! Most men do.

Pam: It’s strange. It’s always been sort of a running joke that men won’t ask directions. And it’s true. So now all these men, who for their entire lives have claimed to have a remarkable sense of direction, insist they must have a fancy GPS system to guide them around.

Ann: I know! A lady in my chorus told me that her husband ordered a super high-tech GPS and had it installed in their station wagon. Now he programs it to give him directions to the same church, grocery store, and post office he’s driven to every week for fifteen years!

Pam: Archie and I were just in a machine maintenance shop where we know the mechanics pretty well. These guys are old fashioned grease monkeys. But they always love to see Archie coming so they can check out his latest high-tech gadgets.

Ann: I’m sure those guys can’t afford to buy a different phone every month like he does.

Pam: As usual, they all wanted to see Archie’s new phone and asked him a bunch of questions about it. Archie loved it. He was eating it up.

Ann: Of course…In a man’s mind, being admired for his technology is the second biggest compliment he can get!

Pam: I’ve always thought if I could just get Archie to appreciate the calming effects of more low-tech hobbies, he’d be less irritable. So a few months ago Bret and I bought him a big round bird bath. Actually it was sort of a water fountain for his backyard. Bret helped him set up the triple tiered stone fountain and then I planted a bunch of plants around the base.

Ann: That soft sound of water really attracts a lot of birds to the yard. So, how’d he like it?

Pam: He liked it. But he complained that the water just dribbled out the top and gently cascaded to each level below.

Ann: Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?

Pam: Sure, but it was too tame for Archie. He went to the home improvement store and bought a stronger pump and installed it in place of the one that came with the fountain.

Ann: He souped up the bird bath!?

Pam: Yep. Then he had to go out and buy a new power supply to increase the voltage or something because of the bigger pump. A couple of days later he figured out that required a bigger fuse because the new power supply was drawing so much electricity that it kept overwhelming the circuit.

Ann: I’ve heard of those shows where they ‘make over’ a guy’s car or truck, but a backyard fountain?

Pam: This thing that originally had water gently cascading out of a hole in the top of a stone orb, was now shooting water fifteen feet in the air!

Ann: You’ve got to be kidding me! That’s crazy.

Pam: I know. It was spraying so high that most of the water falling back down didn’t even make it into the round tiers below. So then he was loosing water so he had to do some plumbing to bring a source of water to the fountain to keep the level up.

Ann: Only Archie! So much for introducing him to the pleasures of low technology.

Pam: I’m telling you…I keep picturing little birds landing on the edge of that fountain and the water shooting them into the air, knocking them beak over feet, their feathers being blasted right off their little bodies. Poor things!

Ann: Or worse, being electrocuted by the world’s only high voltage bird bath!

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!