TechnoPhobia: Our Desperate Fear Of Evil We Love So Much

I give up.

I am officially a part of the evil empire, and I'm not gonna feel bad about it.

What evil empire you ask?  Google, Microsoft, technology....you know, the empire. The people who make my phone and computer become one with the universe at large. The ones who I think are making desktop computer's obsolete so we are more likely to use the phone instead.

For a while I blamed myself. I was fairly good in keyboarding class in high school because of my intensive use of the tool working as an editor of the school paper, but bad typing habits will hamper the growth of your overall speed. Nonetheless, my experience made me faster than most, providing a good way to make some money in college.

Today, I could be a fairly good typist if I didn't keep finding reasons to use my phone instead. This post is all the example you need. I was fresh from a vacation and full of the patience it takes to launch my desktop at home. More specifically, I needed to launch the internet to engage in the art of blogetry. My computer moves fairly fast given the pattern neglect offered by its owner. My issue is the internet. When G+ is sending my daily feed of +WeightDownWithDonna  and +Pauline Cabrera  or my +Ken Thimmel Muhammad Ali feed alongside +Pradheep Shanker , inevitably it will become unresponsive a time or two. Sometimes I try to wait it out, but my phone be callin' me.

It all started with text messaging. We older folks kept our pagers for as long as they felt necessary, but gave in to the ease of cell phones and lack of stores who sold pagers.

  

Now the struggle is between my rapidly depleting typing skills and the necessity to self edit so damn much that it feels as if I am typing everything 3 times over, or a phone that asks me.."did you mean this word?". My kids laughed at my wife and I for years because we continued getting better and better at typing the words into our text messaging screens, letter by painstaking letter, only to see them finish the same stuff in a fraction of the time.  I refuse to admit how many years I had no clue about predictive texting, and my kids just play dumb when I ask them how long they've known about it.

Mostly, I blame myself.  Being mid-40's is not like being 60+.  In fact, when my over 60 mom passed me by in the technology arena, I knew it was time to get my arse in gear.  The issue was not so much knowledge or fear as much as it was sheer defiance.  I totally get it when people who distrust the government and other people refuse to turn the GPS mechanism on their phones on.....ever.  I'm not sure what they do when they go on a mountain trip like I did recently, chasing after golf courses you've never played and you need your GPS phone device to give you course layout pictures and shot distance calculations for a foreign golf course.  But I guess as long as you don't golf you should be okay.  Me?  I golf way too much to live without my GPS signal, so track on Big Brother...track on.

Lately, I have been calling Google the greater equivalent of this Big Brother concept that scares the crap out of so many because it never ceases to amaze me how many private photos Google would like to instantly share with the public...no matter which computer or device I am operating from......hmmmm.  Or how about this one?

I spent the better part of 25 minutes trying to compile the best of vacation photos to share with my G+ family with some chronology to them (for sake of the narrative of course), and no sooner than I hit send does my wife ask me about this vacation portfolio by Doris (my wife) that she never created.  I thought that she was finally following my blog page, but I looked on her computer to see a whole chronological timeline of her vacation photo's ready to be shared in a way much fancier than my 25 minute effort could come up with.  It even offered an option to edit out the pictures you don't want to share and hit share if you decide you would like to do what I spent 25 minutes doing the hard way.

Part of me was mad as hell that I didn't know about this feature because I was plenty tired after an extended weekend of frivolity.  I also attempted to feel rage in support of my enraged wife who was feeling the violation that I had recently complained to her about when addressing Google....but I failed.  I was plotting in my mind the next family vacation and how fast I could cut the crap and share the rest....and I could not hate the evil anymore.

For I have given in.