Sunday, September 07, 2008
Finding my inner gadget wizard
Read Shanna's blog
Shanna Flowers is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
Shanna Flowers
Recent columns
I've privately felt John McCain's pain for a long time. But after the events of last week, I needed to speak out.
I'm not talking about the Republican convention and the intense scrutiny surrounding him and Sarah Palin. I'm talking about my visit to a local cellphone store Thursday and admitting -- as McCain did earlier this year -- that I'm technologically illiterate.
In the middle of the grueling campaign for president, McCain confessed, "I am an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get."
Senator, you're not alone.
The presidential nominee's technology dysfunction is the Internet. Mine is the gadget.
Hitting the wrong button and breaking whatever device I'm trying to use has been a worry. But more than that, my feeling has been if I can get by with the basics, I'll be fine. But when my basic cellphone broke and I went to the Sprint store on Franklin Road last week to get a new one, I felt utterly overwhelmed.
Text-messaging. GPS navigation. Internet. E-mail. Camera. Music. Built-in directory.
My head swam as saleswoman Carrie Cardwell's nimble fingers danced across a slick, glossy little number. She was a sweet, patient young woman.
"You're not dumb," Carrie -- bless her heart -- later told me. "You're just uninformed." Her words were oddly soothing to me, a person who gets paid to stay informed.
"Not everybody is born knowing how to use a BlackBerry," she gently added.
But why are people like me and McCain being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the technology age?
Young people can't imagine growing up as he and I did, without iPods, text-messaging or (gasp!) computers. I'm struggling to understand how they make it all look so easy.
Seeking professional help for my gadget-phobia, I consulted a local expert.
"The greatest thing is fear, and the greatest fear is failure," said Gloria Manns of Manns Counseling Service. "Technology is thrust upon us. You can't live with it, and you can't live without it."
For people 45 and older, she said, "computers don't come natural. We're trying to make something that's not natural come natural."
At 60, Manns embraces technology. She owns a digital camera, a laptop and a cellphone. She took a computer software course and used what she learned to design her daughter's wedding invitations earlier this year, and has signed up for a Web page design class.
"You do have to read the manual," she said, "and you have to read it line by line."
So that's what I'm doing this weekend. Reading the manual and playing with my new Samsung "Instinct," a touch-screen cellphone that does just about everything except change the oil in my car, brush my teeth and comb my hair.
"Text me," Manns said before hanging up.
I will. And maybe I'll rope in John McCain, too. All of us can become BFFs (for folks like me, that's text-message lingo for "best friends forever").
