Tryst/s with technology

Let me start my dull, insipid love affair with technology and gizmos with an honest confession – I am quite a technophobe! It takes me a while to get functional with a gadget/gizmo and it stops with that.

I know some people who truly freak out with their gizmos and love them as they come, upgrading their gizmos with every product launch. Unfortunately/fortunately (I don’t know) I am still on the other side of the fence.

When I was applying for a job some years back, I had enlisted a friend’s help to spruce up my resume. When I reached his place, he was working on his laptop and opened my resume on the laptop. Asking me to take a look at what he had done, he left the room. My first reaction - I was instantly petrified, my mind went blank…..! I had never used a laptop without a mouse and slowly started scrolling the up and down keys on the keyboard very uncomfortably, wondering what to do.

I have come a long long way since then but the reaction is quite the same - at first sight. It continued with my digital camera and cell phone. My digital camera was picked up by a friend during one of his trips abroad – he kept asking me what kind of a specification I want and all I told him was something I can easily shoot pictures with. Goes without saying that I had to spend some time reading the User manual before I started using the already ‘user-friendly’ camera. Of course, necessity is also the driver to my getting to know ways of using it with its various features and modes.

A friend of mine in the US is such a great technophobe that she does not even upload her pictures from her digital camera to a computer but just keeps buying memory cards as and when they get over! She has quite a state of the art (so it seemed to me!) GPS installed in her new car (the GPS came with the car) but it was still new and unused when I caught up with her some months back. She confessed she still had n’t figured how to use it and on the day we set out for a weekend outing, we ended up getting lost - driving miles away from where we were supposed to go and at that crucial juncture, she finally figured how to use the GPS.

In both our cases, Necessity is truly the mother of learning how to use a gadget and then including it in our lifestyle. A ‘lifestyle choice’, as dear K calls it.

The thing about technology (like with most other things) is the more you use it, the more you get addicted to it; It is difficult to shake it off. Like my transition from a desktop to a laptop…

And then my laptop crashed – I am fudging it a bit here, twisting the facts…. My laptop fell down as I was talking with a colleague! Sheer carelessness and negligence on my part. For a month, I switched back to a desktop ruminating over my trysts with technology.

And I realized I missed the laptop so much that the result of it is what you are reading now.

ok, my Ipod gift is still lying as I received it over a month back- unopened and unattended to.

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There’s also a different take on this – its all about getting used to something, is n’t it? We get used to stuff. That’s all. Hence it’s the comfort factor.

When it’s no longer there, you feel some sort of vacuum – for how long and how much- that depends on us.

But after a while, you get used to it.
Life goes on as if that ‘constant’ factor which suddenly disappeared from your life was a mere aberration, a blur… And you get cosy with newer attractions and interests.

I feel this is true with most aspects of life.

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A 28 year old software engineer walks into a dental clinic with his arsenal of plug-in electronic devices, wondering why online health care never made it big.

After an assessment of his problem the dentist informs him to come after a week to finish the treatment. The irate techie asks the dentist why doctors can’t work 24/7 like the techies, if need be from home and always available online.

Pat comes the reply from the dentist, “Sure, just leave your mouth with me for a couple of days and take it back once I am done” leaving the techie flabbergasted.

And then it sinks into his ‘frog-in-an-online-well’ brain. Embarrassed and red faced he leaves with his appointment finally realizing that some things are best done OFFLINE!!!

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