Technology Bullies Me

 I’m at the mercy of Technology’s harddrive heart, and it knows it. It taunts and bullies me as though I were a playground weakling. Despite success in other relationships, I lack the interpersonal skills necessary to live peacefully with the mega-bytes, sensor eyes, and automated-everythings that now run the world. In the spirit of the 21st century, I’ve looked around for someone to blame. I’ve homed in on my maternal grandfather, George Hudson.

I adored Gran, and he could talk anybody out of their socks, but he couldn’t communicate with machines. Their innards, the essence of their soul, were as mysterious to him as the dark side of the moon. He could just barely drive a car. When something stopped working, even something as simple as a blown fuse in the fusebox, Gran would wave a piece of baling wire in the air – the duct tape of his universe -- and send up a prayer that life would hold together. It’s a wonder the man didn’t get electrocuted.

I have this notion of a recessive unable-to-make-things-work gene being handed down to Gran and me from some shivering ancestor who failed to coax fire from a flint stone. I figure that’s how our talking gene got rolling. Our freezing to death progenitor had to talk fast to convince someone else to start a fire for him.

But neither Gran nor my caveman forbear lived in my post-modern world where even going to the restroom is a technological mine field. Today’s “comfort station” is enough to make a grown woman weep.

I’ve spent as long as fifteen minutes in public places trying to convince the commode that, yes, I really am ready to exit now, and it’s time for your wherever it may be sensor to do what it does best and flush. I’ve been reduced to begging, standing up and sitting down, and jumping from side to side. Can you imagine how ridiculous a woman my age looks waving her arms over her head in a tiny toilet cubicle? Well, it’s a wonder I haven’t been arrested for solicitation like that senator from Idaho whose foot slipped over the line in an airport stall.

The new fangled lavatory faucets humiliate me too. They fall into two general categories: the ones with no handles and the kind that you forcibly hold in the on position with one hand while washing the other hand. The latter baffles me completely. I have no idea how to wash a single hand without help from the other. It is, after all, called “washing your hands” not “washing your hand.” All you can do when you run into these contraptions is pray you have a forgotten, crunched up dry- wipe packet hiding in your purse.

But I keep thinking I could master the faucets with no handles at all. I see others succeed in enticing water to flow voluntarily from these hoity-toity sculptures, so why can’t I? Apparently you’re supposed to hold your hands in an exact formation, at an invisible but tightly defined spot in thin air. But there are no instructions, I keep insisting. What is the magical latitude and longitude that will make the water gush?

Now the soap dispensers are getting in on the act and are demanding a little hand-hula routine before they will consent to part with a tiny, measured amount of soap. “Look,” I tried explaining to one especially stingy soap do-dad, “if you knew where these hands have been you would give me more than one squirt without my even having to ask.” Because where they had been, I could have gone on, was all over the toilet stall trying to locate a manual button to flush the commode.

Then there are the parsimonious paper towel dispensers that also demand a magic word to release a helpful scrap. “Open sesame, open sesame” I chant to no effect.

Oh, I could go on and on. I did, however, resolve my issues with the TV remote that’s programmed in Chinese. I leave the TV on 24/7 now and mute the volume. Hey, even weaklings win some battles.

My computer and I have also reached a truce. If I promise not to venture out of the slow lane, it’s agreed not to mock me with irrationally indented lines. It’s also agreed not to kidnap my column and hide it in a mysterious folder if my deadline is less than five minutes away. Up until then, however, it contends all’s fair in the pecking order, and that nothing’s more fun than a game of “got cha.”

Sigh.