Low Tech Granny in a High Tech World

I admit it. I am pretty much an idiot when it comes to electronics. 

I don't have a smart phone. Mine is a dumb phone that I don't even know how to take pictures on. And I just barely learned how to text a couple of months ago. That was only because I was coaching  a group of teenage girls in volleyball and I quickly learned that they wouldn't even answer their cell phone if they didn't know who was calling, and the only way they knew who was calling was if they had my number in their "contacts". Like that's gonna happen! When I texted them I had to make sure to say who it was first so they would understand what the heck I was talking about. Seems crazy to me, but whatever!

                               

I still use a normal little digital camera, and we even have a big old video camera that we can't find a place that sells the cassettes to use it. I can barely work it and the thoughts of taking a video with a smart phone is beyond me. I loved taking pictures of family activities because my grandkids were always doing something cute. Now they live so far away, even the old fashioned digital camera only gets pulled out occasionally. I think I have taken ten pictures since the kids visited last summer, and I have about a billion from then.

Returning to college full time a year ago to finish my Bachelors Degree has been an adventure. I tried to take a computer class to learn to make friends with the computer. However, turned out that the class was learning the latest and greatest version and it still had a lot of bugs in it. The teacher was even struggling with the new program, but we were told not to quit because we could put on our resumes that we were beta testers for it.

I DON'T WANT TO BE A BETA TESTER! I WANT TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH COMPUTERS!

Yea, I dropped that class in a hurry.

My laptop is only a couple of years old, but apparently it is already a dinosaur. I know how to type and can do a few things I learned at jobs I have had in the past. But learning new things on the computer just doesn't stick unless I do it over and over and over again. So annoying! (to me AND the younger folks I worked with!) In one of my classes we have to do a huge group project, and as usual I am the oldest member of the group. The other kids thought it would be easiest to do it all in Google docs. Google What!?!

I am barely used to using "google" as a verb, and now it has docs!!

                       

They told me it would be so easy to learn and that I would not have any problems with it. Ri-i-i-ight...just baby me along and I'll be fine. Oh, and please give me all of the writing assignments because I am great at that.

My eight-year-old grandson just started a youtube account and his three-year-old brother knows how to do more with a smart phone than I do. Five year old sister is a whiz at the phone's games. I can't even figure out how to make a simple phone call on those things, but my grandkids can!

My theory is that kids today are "native speakers" of all things electronic. I, on the other hand, am a traveler in a foreign land. Hopefully the longer I visit, the more fluent I will become. It may take awhile though, and by then google will have had other babies that I am supposed to know how to use. But I will keep plugging along a little at a time, and maybe even remember how to do a few things along the way. Let's hope so because I am now entering "The Land of Blogging". Wish me luck!