Return Of The Luddite!

As people are lining up around the block to get their hands in the new iPhone, a magazine ad for another type of cell phone caught my wife's eye!

The Jitterbug offers about a dozen buttons... the numbers zero through nine, "yes" and "no"buttons, and that's about it. The phone does NOT have text messaging, a camera or an mp3 player, or any other features for that matter. Plus - if you dial zero, a jitterbug operator will come on the line to help you figure out how to use your phone - just in case dialing a phone number and pushing the "yes" button to connect is too complicated.

Yes- the Jitterbug phone is being marketed to senior citizens - or, really, to the children of seniors, who want their parents to carry a cell phone in case of emergencies. Robin thinks the phones are neat because every time she gets a new cell phone, she needs about a week to learn how to use it. Plus, she's a luddite. In her defense, I must say that Modern cell phones are notoriously counter-intuitive, and their user manuals are usually difficult to read at best! I'm far more advanced technologically than my wife is, but there are buttons on my phone that I still have no idea how to use.

Still - if we want to avoid becoming our parents, we MUST learn and embrace new technology! My mother-in-law refuses to give up her dial-up AOL and progress to broadband, and I give her grief about it all the time... The millennials who responded in comments to this youtube ad for the Jitterbug phone thought it was hilarious that someone would buy what amounts to a black-and-white television in a high-def bigscreen color world. Their comments may show a lack of respect for their elders, but they are not wrong. We all have to move along to get along!

My Wife Is A Photographic Luddite!

I may have mentioned before in this missive that Mrs. Matthews is technologically challenged. Several years ago, when I wanted to buy her a digital camera, she resisted mightily. She was far more comfortable with the idea of continuing to take her rolls of 35mm film up to CVS, wait two days and get back an envelope stuffed with twin prints that she could then quickly stuff in the nearest drawer, never to be seen again.

I am now proud to say, however, that Robin has acclimated to her camera, and she gleefully shoots pictures with reckless abandon. In fact, she has more than 300 snapshots on her camera now - and that number is growing because she has no idea how to delete any of them. She also doesn't know how to download them to the computer. She forces me to do the job instead!

I have been protesting against this for some time, of course. Robin has a Master's Degree in education, so she can darn well figure out how to maintain a digital camera. But her proposed solution to the problem is certifiably 20th century. She says she can just take her camera's memory card to CVS, and have the magic Kodak machine print out her pictures (even twin prints!) there! If she runs out of space on the memory card, she can just buy another one!

Fast forward to this morning... Robin needed to download some pictures to our computer for work purposes. I forced her to do the job herself, which was a big mistake. The 2-minute chore turned into a 20-minute computer lesson as Robin successfully downloaded the files, but then promptly lost them on the hard drive. I found the files, and also introduced the Missus to the phenomenon of dragging-and-dropping files and folders. Have mercy on her. She spent her learning-computers-in-the-workplace years raising babies instead...

Still, I sometimes think my wife doesn't need Windows OR a husband... She needs a HAL 9000... a computer that does as it's told!