Sunday, September 1, 2019

Brave New World




My life currently has become one technical milestone after another.

     
     I’m now stumbling through the learning curve of a new laptop with shiny new Windows 10.
My husband assures me this is not the first iteration of 10 – the one that drove perfectly rational people screaming from their computers.

We’ll see (she said darkly).

          My Saturday morning was spent with the computer guru who was theoretically schooling me on the use of my new laptop. As she whizzed the mouse from one icon to another and pulled up files only to zip off to something else, I had a flash of what some of my past students must have felt when I would demonstrate iambic pentameter in Hamlet. I finally reached the nod-and-grunt-in-affirmation stage even if I had no idea what she’d just done.

          (In writing the above, I had to stop and first fight my way through the unfamiliar toolbar to prevent the program from whimsically throwing extra spaces in between the paragraphs.)



          Today My Guy and I motored off to Best Buy to purchase an MP3 player. I don’t particularly want one, but my beloved Zune, a prehistoric player no longer manufactured, refuses to sync with the new laptop. I loved my Zune. The audiobooks I loaded to it made it possible for me to put one foot after another. Literally. Walking for exercise bores me to death otherwise. And carrying my heavy iPhone instead feels like strapping a phone book to my hip.  So now another thing to learn to operate.

          This afternoon in Big Box Store I realized I was channeling what men must feel like at the mall with their wives. I walked in, found the product I wanted, and was ready to check out when I looked around to find My Guy had drifted off to some other display. I stood around while he debated the merits of one Smart Plug after another. To his credit, he didn’t get seduced by the drone display or the home security cameras, but I did see a number of men staring into glass counters while their womenfolk (if they had any there) hovered in the background patiently.

          If men carried purses, we would have been holding them while they shopped.


13 comments:

  1. Ha! I know I've seen all those men at Best Buy before, browsing the way many women do in department stores. Good luck with your new computer. As an Apple person, it gives me the willies to think about having to navigate Windows 10. I hope you post more about it some time later. :-)

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  2. I knew where you were going when you mentioned women folk hovering. My sister used to locate her husband by his whistling. Once she did go to the service desk and have them page the man whistling, probably from the back of the store.

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  3. We have been clinging to Win7 like barnacles on a favorite rock, and probably will until they shut us down next year at some point. I loved win 95, I think it was my favorite of all of them, easy to work with, easy to customize. But each new expansion has taken a bit off the top and too much off the sides of my own favorite programs, rendering them annoyingly overblown and useless. I loved the last iteration of Word, this new one is worthless for working efficiently.
    My favorite PhotoDraw program goes back to y2K, and I expect will disappear when we get into Win10.

    I'm not good with change, and this will be painful. It's hard enough when programs decide to ramp up their 'efficiency" or change the way they work...


    And yeah, I've seen that look too, anytime he gets too close to Best Buy. He also gets that look in Home Depot.

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  4. Sigh.
    Technology just doesn't float my boat. It is sometimes necessary, sometimes useful, but...
    I am a hoverer in those stores. Not always patiently.

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  5. Once you get used to the fact Windows 10 is apps based just like a smart phone, I think you'll be fine. And you don't have to use the apps, the start menu still pops up to be scrolled through if that's what you prefer. I haven't yet tried my old mp3 player on this new laptop. I probably should. it isn't any version of an I-pod so doesn't work with I-tunes, but does work with the windows media playlists.

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    1. you might want to add, for those of you Luddites that DON"T have a smart phone, good luck...

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  6. I haven't heard of a Zune in a while! I think the assumption is people just use their phones to play MP3s now -- weighty or not. My iPod is a useless relic at this point; I just use my phone.

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    1. Another gender issue - ladies' exercise pants rarely have pockets, never mind something that would accommodate an iPhone. And ladies' jeans are so busy being about fit that we often don't even get pockets.

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  7. Interesting observation. With me it might be a photography store.

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    1. mine would be a bookstore. Our nearest one is 40 miles from here, and I get there all too rarely. When I do, I glaze over with overwhelmingness...

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  8. Months spent trying my new camera and still have to work more on it!! I am the one in the marriage that can use the computer pretty well and as changes come and I am not longer introduced to them through a job, I find this hunt and peck for info annoying.

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  9. My spaced out place is bookstores. any bookstore. We live a good 40 miles from one now, and there is never enough time to take it all in.

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  10. a new computer is in the future for me and I dread having to learn the whatever the now Mac OS will be.

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