CALL ME A LUDDITE¹ 

I have a terrible relationship with technology. She and I waste hours of precious time, stressed to the max, every day, as we wrestle, pull hair and fruitlessly attempt to communicate. In the end, I often feel stupid and frustrated to the point of rage. There are several aspects of technology that I clash with. I’ll start with the cell phone.  

I do own one.  Because my bus-driving job does not include office space, a cell phone is handy for making quick calls during one of several seven minute breaks. Once break is over and I’m driving again, I don’t answer the phone but when calls come in, sometimes the phone rings, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes a blinking red light shows me I have a message. Other times, I find a message only when I open the phone and see the tiny envelope icon on the screen. Occasionally, my phone shows a caller’s name on the ID screen, but usually, it’s just a number even though I fastidiously program names and numbers into my phone in the same sequence. Although my phone is temperamental, I don’t have time or patience to research it, much less a new phone, or wait on line to navigate through umpteen options from a call center menu that includes everything but a real person. Instead, I tolerate it.

What is harder to tolerate is other people with their cell phones. Especially when I’m at an intersection, behind schedule, and the driver up ahead, busy on a cell phone, misses her chance to make a turn. Then, there’s the conscientious cell-phone driver who pulls over and parks in a convenient bus stop to make his call, but ignores the elderly woman who must hobble off the curb and cross in front of him to reach the open bus, now parked in the driving lane. Worst of all is when the cell phone interferes with intimacy. Daily, I watch young mothers drag neglected toddlers in one hand while their attention is riveted to a cell phone held on ear with their other.

The cell phone is only one of many technological gadgets that I struggle with. There’s the digital wrist watch with its baffling array of buttons almost the size of pin-heads. I stab at these miniature buttons with a nearby pencil but succeed only in breaking the lead. There’s my new 32’’ integrated high definition LCD television purchased for one thousand dollars after spending no more than one hundred dollars on TV’s in the previous two decades. The images on this new set are stunningly sharp. However, right at the climax of a rare TV event, a ménage of colorful, digital squares shift distortedly and then freeze at the punch-line; “Oh No! Is this an antennae problem?”  Then, last week, I called an out-of-town intensive care unit to check on a young woman who attempted suicide the night before.  I stood in my kitchen, shell shocked, waiting, re-dialing, waiting and re-dialing again, because the phone transfer system would not function properly. Had I felt any less helpless, I might have thrown the phone against the wall. 

Of all my battles with technology, the most frequent and despairing ones are fought with a smart, young laptop, Dell. She’s a sensitive machine blinking on brightly, then crashing black, or scrolling her buttons up and down the screen when I least expect it, or highlighting by accident at inopportune moments but refusing to highlight when I coax her. She holds the e-mail, the blog, the homework, the photos, and the thousand known and unknown ways to drive me crazy. 

I can’t even begin to describe the panic, the paralysis, the blank staring at icons, and the maniacal behavior I engage in with Dell in this bad relationship between technology and me.  I can’t begin because I don’t have space left in this essay, or time, for that matter.  There are only three hours left to figure out how to upload E1.1 to Comment.

¹ Luddite: 1) An opponent of technological or industrial change 2) A worker who was involved in protests in the
U.K. in 1810s against new factory methods of production and who favored traditional methods of work