Technofogia

Courtesy of My Generation.

Two of my younger colleagues have spent most of the day thinking up terms to describe older people – you know, those older than about 20 - who can’t cope with technology. The loss of productivity is, I felt, adequately compensated for by the amount and intensity of the laughter generated by the invention of such terms as technofogia – the fear that young people have of being approached by old people asking silly questions about technology, and catatechnia – a condition experienced by baby boomers after prolonged exposure to technical instruction. I don’t mind. The fact that they have spend all afternoon laughing out loud at my expense will no doubt stave off their stress-induced heart attacks for another month or two.

And I can’t complain. I do have occasional mental blocks. For example, while I can remember in its entirety the February 1970 bus timetable from Dunedin’s Octagon to St Clair Beach, I can never remember when daylight saving starts and ends and what to do to the clocks. Or how to do it. When daylight saving first began in the seventies we had one electric clock with a winder on the bottom that you turned to change the time. It took about three seconds. These days I have to change the clocks in two computers, two cellphones, the regular phone, the oven, the microwave, two stereos, two televisions, the DVD player, two cars (clocks and radios) and the digital camera. This requires the instruction book for each appliance, two pairs of glasses, a paperclip, one right handed fingernail of reasonable length and strength, a very small screwdriver, 5mg of valium and the day off work. Now tell me technology has saved us time and improved our quality of life.

Pin numbers is another case in point. Most households have at least as many pin numbers as they have clocks. Not me. The chances of my remembering the one I have are limited, much less the 27 I probably ought to have. So if anyone figures out the last two letters of the name of our family’s first ginger cat, coupled with the first two letters of the name of the racehorse on which my father won a hundred pounds at the Oamaru trots in 1969, followed by the age of my brother when he ran over the kid next door’s bike in his Morris 8, and the last letter of the phone number we had back in the days where you had to ring the exchange to make a phone call, I’m dead.

So I admit it. I’m a technofogey.  However, unlike my technosavvy younger colleague, I at least have enough sense not to put my mobile phone through the wash. Would that be called technosudsia? Cellsubmersia?  Or, to use a thoroughly old-fashioned term, plain stupid.  

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