Read Online My Formerly Hot Life by Stephanie Dolgoff - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephanie Dolgoff
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just that before, when a song like The Cure’s “Pictures of You” spoke to me, it said,
How precious and ephemeral is love
. Now it says,
Run out and buy an HP printer
. (Yes, I own an HP printer.)
I’m beginning to understand that the pop cultural divide between a Formerly and someone who is not is vast, and is as much of a marker of the passage of time as any facial wrinkle or income bracket. Our facility with computers, of course, is a big, thick line in the sand between Formerlies and those that were born later. Formerlies are once again “tweens” vis-à-vis computer technology: too old to have been immersed in it when our brains were soft and absorbent, and too young to ignore it entirely, at least if we want to earn a living and function in society.
Occasionally I run into a (usually male) Formerly who still thinks it’s kind of neat that he is not charmed by technology, and proudly declares himself a luddite. (The original Luddites, of course, being artisans in Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution who felt they were being replaced by the advent of machines and so sometimes torched textile factories.) Nowadays, it strikes me as plain lame: There’s nothing cool or intellectual about not knowing how to do something.The IT guys sure don’t want to hear about it and I highly doubt it will get you laid.
When I was in college, few people had their own computers, and if they did, they were awkward, hulking behemoths with tiny glowing amber screens, and people had to bring their floppy discs elsewhere to print things out on that paper with the holes on the sides. There was something called a computer lab, but I never went there, having heard horror stories about senior theses vanishing into the ether just hours before they were due. People only a few years younger than us had computers in high school, but my contemporaries and I typed our papers.
I’m not proud, but even today, after years of using Macs and PCs for work and muddling through a blogging program for formerlyhot.com , my first instinct when I get that spinning rainbow beach ball of death (Mac users will know what I mean) is to smack the monitor, take a nap and hope that the problem resolves by the time I get up. There’s a chance I’d be that way even if I had my first keyboard to drool on when I was a toddler, like my daughters did.
But for the longest time, the sense of not knowing enough on a basic level to address even the most minor problem myself made me want to scream with despair. Sometimes I’d go to the “help” menu and find that I lacked even the vocabulary to look up my problem—“the little hand thingy won’t turn back into the arrow thingy” wasn’t in the index. It felt like I was being asked to learn an entirelynew language, one that I didn’t have the time for, and one that would not enable me to order delicious food in a foreign country.
I’ve gotten more adept through sheer exposure, but even now, decades after MS-DOS, when something goes wrong in a big way, and I’m told that there is a new driver (I have no idea what that is) I can download to prevent the problem from occurring in the future, I feel like smacking the monitor again, because I know I will need help even with that. I hate feeling like I’m not adept at what has become as integral a part of daily life as putting a key into a lock and turning it.
A Formerly friend of mine, Rachel, who runs a magazine website, did make me feel a lot better about my tech reticence, though. “I started at a website at a time when no one knew what they were talking about,” she said. “I saw behind the curtain, so I know that it all started as a bunch of people totally making it up.” To an extent, that’s what’s still going on, which is probably why there’s an “update” every few weeks that you need to avail yourself of. Granted, Rachel is technically inclined, but her attitude—that there’s no way to know everything, so you shouldn’t feel
How precious and ephemeral is love
. Now it says,
Run out and buy an HP printer
. (Yes, I own an HP printer.)
I’m beginning to understand that the pop cultural divide between a Formerly and someone who is not is vast, and is as much of a marker of the passage of time as any facial wrinkle or income bracket. Our facility with computers, of course, is a big, thick line in the sand between Formerlies and those that were born later. Formerlies are once again “tweens” vis-à-vis computer technology: too old to have been immersed in it when our brains were soft and absorbent, and too young to ignore it entirely, at least if we want to earn a living and function in society.
Occasionally I run into a (usually male) Formerly who still thinks it’s kind of neat that he is not charmed by technology, and proudly declares himself a luddite. (The original Luddites, of course, being artisans in Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution who felt they were being replaced by the advent of machines and so sometimes torched textile factories.) Nowadays, it strikes me as plain lame: There’s nothing cool or intellectual about not knowing how to do something.The IT guys sure don’t want to hear about it and I highly doubt it will get you laid.
When I was in college, few people had their own computers, and if they did, they were awkward, hulking behemoths with tiny glowing amber screens, and people had to bring their floppy discs elsewhere to print things out on that paper with the holes on the sides. There was something called a computer lab, but I never went there, having heard horror stories about senior theses vanishing into the ether just hours before they were due. People only a few years younger than us had computers in high school, but my contemporaries and I typed our papers.
I’m not proud, but even today, after years of using Macs and PCs for work and muddling through a blogging program for formerlyhot.com , my first instinct when I get that spinning rainbow beach ball of death (Mac users will know what I mean) is to smack the monitor, take a nap and hope that the problem resolves by the time I get up. There’s a chance I’d be that way even if I had my first keyboard to drool on when I was a toddler, like my daughters did.
But for the longest time, the sense of not knowing enough on a basic level to address even the most minor problem myself made me want to scream with despair. Sometimes I’d go to the “help” menu and find that I lacked even the vocabulary to look up my problem—“the little hand thingy won’t turn back into the arrow thingy” wasn’t in the index. It felt like I was being asked to learn an entirelynew language, one that I didn’t have the time for, and one that would not enable me to order delicious food in a foreign country.
I’ve gotten more adept through sheer exposure, but even now, decades after MS-DOS, when something goes wrong in a big way, and I’m told that there is a new driver (I have no idea what that is) I can download to prevent the problem from occurring in the future, I feel like smacking the monitor again, because I know I will need help even with that. I hate feeling like I’m not adept at what has become as integral a part of daily life as putting a key into a lock and turning it.
A Formerly friend of mine, Rachel, who runs a magazine website, did make me feel a lot better about my tech reticence, though. “I started at a website at a time when no one knew what they were talking about,” she said. “I saw behind the curtain, so I know that it all started as a bunch of people totally making it up.” To an extent, that’s what’s still going on, which is probably why there’s an “update” every few weeks that you need to avail yourself of. Granted, Rachel is technically inclined, but her attitude—that there’s no way to know everything, so you shouldn’t feel
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