Low Tech Granny in a High Tech World - UVU Review Style

This is a copy of the first thing I ever had published. March 3, 2014. It was in the UVU Review, the college's newspaper. Kinda fun to see my name in print, with the title of "Staff Writer" underneath! Who knew that they were going to put it on the top HALF of the FIRST PAGE of the Life Section? It is a lot like another post, so thanks for indulging me.

Low Tech Granny in a High Tech World

The struggles a non-traditional student has with technology

By Marinann Castillo

Staff Writer

Returning to college full time a year ago to finish my Bachelor’s Degree after 34 years has been a technological adventure. 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. I just barely learned how to text a couple of months ago. That was only because I learned that other students don’t even answer their cell phone if they don't know who is calling. And the only way they would know I was calling was if they had me in their "contacts". Like that’s gonna happen!

My kids complain because I don’t answer my cell phone a lot of the time. I don’t carry it in my pocket because I already have more padding than needed in that area and I don’t want any more. And how am I supposed to remember to turn the ringer back on after class? Or for that matter, to turn it off once I am in class. I think I need to invent a way to hang it around my neck somehow. Can you say “bling-y lanyards” anyone?                              

I tried to take a computer class to learn to make friends with the thing, but the new lab program still had a lot of bugs in it. I was told not to quit because I could put on my resume that I was a beta tester for it, but I don’t want to be a beta tester. I just 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!

In one of my classes we had to do a huge group project, and as usual I was the oldest member of the group. The other students 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 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 a while 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 I’ll even remember how to do a few things along the way.