A Tech Wreck

I own a laptop, an iPad, and an iPhone. My laptop is grey and it’s lightweight. The cover of my iPad is a silhouette of two thin trees splotched with wispy autumn leaves. There is a round thing on the back of my iPhone that pulls out so I can hold it, and the screen saver is a photo of my adorable granddaughter Lily.

That is everything I know about my electronic devices.

The brazen bewilderment I feel whenever I get near digital technology is not my fault. I was born 70 years ago, when the most sophisticated machinery in my life was Mr. Potato Head. I didn’t come out of the womb with an Apple Watch. I didn’t text before I talked. I didn’t use Excel in Kindergarten. And I didn’t share nude photos of myself in second grade.

Like most people my age, I approach various computer functions with the kind of terror usually reserved for North Korean missiles or being seen in a bathing suit. Every interaction I have ever had with a computer has resulted in a minor nervous breakdown. My inabilities are legion.

There is a feature on my Mac that translates English into 162 languages. Last year, for no reason at all except that God hates me, I was writing a letter to the wife of an Alabama minister and it suddenly converted to Croatian. It ruined the graceful, nuanced tone I had created because there is no linguistic equivalent for “loathsome, puffed up, bile-tongued sow babbling lunatic religious smut.”

Six months ago, I ordered Nora Ephron’s last book from Amazon. Four days later, I received three toaster ovens.

I hate Facebook. I’m not interested in photos of anyone’s dinner. Or someone grinning at the entrance to Dollywood. Or reading an excruciatingly detailed story about someone’s cataract surgery. I never take selfies because I don’t want to see my crinkled crone face, and neither does anyone else. It’s an unseemly sight for public display.

Siri doesn’t speak to me. Even if I press the microphone key for ten minutes and ask her to list all of Bradley Cooper’s movies, she doesn’t answer. It’s not a malfunction. She’s just never really liked me.

I’m suspicious of interactive games. What do I know about the person on the other end of Words With Friends? Has she ever been to prison? What are her views on Index Annuities? Does she take Prozac? Is she, God forbid, a Sagittarius? Under no other circumstances would I spend four hours a day with someone whose politics and shoe size I didn’t know.

I still don’t understand what the “esc” key does.

I have tapped “delete” instead of “save” a thousand times and shrieked as all my words disappeared into a blank screen. I know they’re not really gone. They’ve just relocated. They are tumbling with ten trillion other words on the far side of some murky universe, floating through cyberspace or the ethernet or a bunch of fiber optic cables. They’re safely stored in a vault inside a microchip the size of a human cell and all I have to do is retrieve them. But I don’t know how. I’ll never see those words again, because computers are bullies with no manners, no morals, and no conscience.

And even though I have a fairly reliable grasp of the English language, computers use a bewildering vocabulary that contains familiar words in unfamiliar combinations.

For instance, is Bluetooth a dental problem?
Is a cursor someone who says “fuck” too often?
If you unfriend a friend can you get back together?
Is a hard drive going to California in a 2002 Chevy Cavalier with three drunken fraternity brothers?
How can there be a ping without a pong?
I don’t even want to know what a joystick is.

As baffling as the terminology is, I am far more brain damaged trying to understand the conceptual mysteries of computers.

Someone who was clearly a liar of astonishing magnitude told me that all computers are based on questions to which the only answers are yes or no, more commonly 1 or 0. That means that two dull and insignificant numbers are in charge of everything in the world. Planes take off and land. Robotic surgeries are performed. Foreign currency is exchanged. Ship signals find crevices in the Mariana Trench. And I can tell my cousin once and for all that she is a lazy, selfish, white trash bitch.

All of that exists because a 1 or a 0 answers 5 billion questions at the speed of sound. People who believe that also believe that low fat ice cream has no calories, the earth is 6,000 years old, and cheerful thinking cures cancer.

GPS is another concept so improbable it is ludicrous.

Apparently, something in my car has figured out that when I drive from the Gold Coast in Chicago to the Waffle House in Bemidji, Minnesota, a little map on my dashboard sends a signal to a satellite in the sky, and the satellite finds a receptor in Lubbock or Tokyo that tells me in a nagging female voice there is too much traffic on Division St., so I should take side streets to 90/94 West, and go 5.6 miles to Exit 43 B, which is 90 W toward Rockford, but there is a huge accident about 6 miles before the I-94 West Exit to St. Paul, but since that’s 221.3 miles away, it will probably be cleaned up by the time I get there.

Then there’s a soft, fluffy white place, the Cloud, which is very much like heaven. Nobody has actually seen it, but most people believe it’s there. Not everything is allowed to enter because there’s a rather stern admissions code. Some data is sent away because its format is unfamiliar or unusual and the Cloud favors conformity of appearance. But rejected data still has several more chances to get in. Apparently, already being saved matters a lot. Some data is expelled and sent immediately to an eternal Trash, where it remains unavailable and alone except for a large number of Evangelicals, forever.

Fortunately for me, my husband Mark was a nerdy teenager who became a computer genius. He has infinite patience with me, and with a degree of stupidity so rare and extensive it has received several standing ovations. On numerous occasions when I sobbed with frustration and fury, he saved me from what I considered at the time very sensible reasons to throw myself in front of a train.

His technological savvy, however, has a dark side. He and his digital toys have an alarmingly codependent connection. He thinks, talks, exercises, sleeps, shops, reads, eats, invests, drives, and showers according to the data provided by his various devices. He seems to be merging with them in some unhealthy, organic way and in about three years I’ll be having sex with a circuit board.

For instance, Mark has an app connected to his electric toothbrush that lets him know if a tooth has been inadequately cleaned, and which one. This is a degree of personal hygiene that borders on deeply demented.

Every morning he checks an App that scans the front of all the envelopes at the Post Office addressed to us, so he knows exactly what will be delivered in the afternoon. It’s very efficient, but it takes all the fun and surprise out of lawsuits, arrest warrants, bank over drafts, and threats from the IRS.

He has an App that videotapes him playing tennis so that when he finishes he can feel miserable.

He has another App that is particularly disgusting. It alerts him to every purchase on my Visa card so that before I leave a store, he calls and asks, “So what did you just buy at Nordstroms for $614.77?” Fortunately, new federal regulations now protect my privacy from crude and menacing intrusions like this.

Mark uses his Smartwatch incessantly, which has dramatically diminished my sexual attraction to him. There’s something fundamentally unappealing about a man who talks to his wrist.

As unnecessary as Marks Apps seem to me, they are innocent pastimes compared to dozens of others, designed exclusively for slouching cretons who have too much time and not enough brain cells. They are enormously entertained by digital drivel, including

Paper Racing, an app that records you competing with friends to see who can spin off a roll of toilet paper fastest;

iBeer, an app that turns an iPhone into a virtual pint of beer you can pretend to drink;

Cuddlr, a location app that finds people in your area who will cuddle with you;

Run Pee, an app that assesses movies to alert you to the proper time to go to the bathroom so you don’t miss an important scene;

Howl, an app that makes expressive grunts, moans, roars, and wails for no particular reason;

K Blocker, an app that stops any information regarding the Kardashians from appearing on Safari;

And Pimple Popper, an app for people who love to pop pimples. It includes instructions on how to pop every kind of pimple, and records you popping your own to post on Facebook.

Most Apps like these just waste time. Digital technology, on the other hand, ruins lives.

For me, nothing about a computer is user friendly. It’s a hostile, obtuse, uncooperative, and demoralizing mangle of malicious microchips. Using one, under all circumstances, is a mental exertion that leads directly to Thorazine. I know that a working knowledge of how computers function opens new worlds of information, communication, and personal management. But the learning curve is prohibitively steep, and I don’t have any hiking boots.

To be sure, it’s a wondrous machine that is efficient, entertaining, brilliant, stimulating, and magical but I can’t seem to access all those wonders. It’s all there, but I can’t get to it. Fumbling as I invariably do, it’s a painful exercise is intellectual inadequacy. Sort of like trying to talk to a toddler in Mensa.