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Jewish World Review Nov. 11, 2005 / 9 Mar-Cheshvan, 5766 iGeezer Generation By Lenore Skenazy
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
When I was about 9, my grandfather saw me using a push-button phone and exclaimed to my mother, "Kenahora!" which roughly translates as: Move over, Einstein (and, while we're at it, Golda Meir). "So young and she can push the keys!"
I'm sorry to say that my eyes rolled at this geezerly observation — same way my 9-year-old's eyes roll now when I am amazed that, kenahora, he knows how to program my cell phone. So young and he can push the keys!
And, ahem, I can't. At least, not to program the thing. No, I simply stop on the sidewalk, pull out my little phone book and proceed to dial the number, often while crouching on the sidewalk, because it's hard to juggle everything.
What's wrong with that?
Nothing, except I'm acting like an 80-year-old (with good knees). Like my grandfather before me, I have become a technogeezer. Only I became one back in my 30s.
There are plenty of us — folks whose bodies are still firm, minds still keen and iPods still in their original boxes. We are 40-year-old virgins when it comes to anything combining the words "down" and "load," not to mention "zip" and "drive," as well as "Ti" and "VO." As my friend Laura puts it: "I couldn't burn a CD with a blowtorch."
Who needs to adapt anyway? We are happy with our current cell-phone ring — "Lick My Lollipop" — simply because we're used to it. Okay. Simply because we have no idea how to change it.
Nor are we in any hurry to download pictures from our digital cameras, because any minute now Michael Dell is going to walk through the door and do it for us. We hope.
We don't need an MP3 player because we have all these newfangled CDs. And if we never figure out how to instant-message, so what? We know how to instant-pudding and that's enough.
I guess the official definition of a technogeezer is: One so unwilling to embrace new technology that he or she will do pretty much anything to get around it.
"I used to take my cell phone back to the store and have them retrieve my messages for me because I didn't know how to do it," says Tracey, 48. Thank goodness she's past that phase now. She gave the phone to her daughter.
My friend Gigi is learning Spanish because it's too hard to figure out how to get her TV back to broadcasting in English.
And legion are those of us who will never record a TV show because that involves programming a VCR. Or does it? Maybe now it involves a DVD player. G-d knows, because the VCR itself was many a geezer's Waterloo: We tried, we failed, we never tried again.
That's where we're at until Steve Jobs invents a Chiclet-sized device that lets old people bend their knees. And with any luck, my son will program mine.
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JWR contributor Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for The New York Daily News. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, NY Daily News |
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