Blog #4

This week I can say I have not learned anything new technologically. Instead, I strolled down memory lane to the first computer class I took as a child. I first must mention that I was raised in a traditional family setting. My father owned an Indiana limestone business and my mother was a homemaker. I am an only child. We owned two T.V.’s, however, cable was not allowed. At one point, we owned the game that played Pong on the TV set. We quickly lost interest in Pong and allowed the server box to collect dust until my mom got tired of looking at it and pitched it. My grandparents did have cable and eventually bought the grandchildren an Atari. I spent a lot of weekends during high school at my grandparents playing Atari and watching MTV.
For the majority of my childhood I was under the impression, due to my mom’s lack of confidence in technology, and my father never mentioning it, I thought that computers and technology would be a passing societal phase. That was why I was shocked when my mom signed me up for my first computer course over my summer vacation sometime around 1980 or 1981. What a joke! The class was taught by a computer nerd (I am married to an IT project developer, so I am allowed to say “nerd” or “geek!”) who had a pocket protector, a swoop, and absolutely no disciplining skills. The only thing I remember about the class, other than the teacher, was that I missed time being out in the sun, flirting with the cute guy in the front row, and the sugar cubes I ate located on the coffee counter along the way to the restroom.
The next experience I had with computers was in a high school class. Being from Bloomington, our local schools were guinea pigs for IU’s “new teaching innovations.” Therefore, during this guinea pig teaching innovation era we were on our own to learn however we could. It took me the entire semester to learn how to get Happy Birthday to blink on my screen. Wow, I learned a lot there!!
The third occasion I recall occurred during my undergrad studies. David, my boyfriend now husband, wrote out the instructions for me to save one school paper on a 5 1/4 inch floppy disc. I had two floppy’s and this long set of instructions that told me when I needed to insert a specific floppy, remove it, insert the other floppy, etc… etc…..etc…. All I remember is that it was very time consuming, frustrating, and again I was missing being out in the sun.
Finally, when David and I got our first PC, I very nervously would write my school papers in Word and save them to the desktop. I had to wait until David could save them to a 3 ½ inch floppy because I had previously lost one great paper trying to save it that way. So from then on I left the dirty work of saving to a disc to David. I also had a problem of “mysterious icon movings” on occasion. David would fix that problem also.
I think back over the past twenty five years of my limited and most of the time frustrating technological encounters and wonder where I would be today technologically if I had not married an IT guy. I probably would not own a computer and be even further in the dark technologically than I am today.
As my mom once said when I used to make fun of the geeks as technology was moving forward: “Those geeks are going to rule the world one day.”
Don’t you hate it when your mom is right?
Talk to you next week.