My bedside lamp wouldn’t turn on. It had been a long week and it was late, but I can’t sleep without reading a Mommy Bedtime Story, which comes in the form of a celebrity gossip magazine (for some reason, I sleep better knowing that Nicole Richie takes out the garbage and uses napkins “just like us”). I looked at the bulb and it appeared intact. I rechecked the wall plug. Then I vigorously flipped the lamp’s switch three times. Like Evel Knievel attempting to jump the Grand Canyon, I figured that if I exerted enough force, the electricity would jump over what I imagined to be a broken circuit. Nothing.
“Ray!” I yelled to my husband, “My light is broken!”
He came into the room, listened patiently to my two-minute rant that began with Thomas Edison and ended with GE’s pigtail light bulbs, then he flipped the wall switch. My lamp came on.
“This switch controls the outlet by the bed,” he explained it as if telling me that you use peanut butter and jelly to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Ray knows not to bite. He can explain circuit breakers, computers and why the sky is blue. But these things will never make sense to me.
I spend a good part of my day screaming rhetorical questions at my computer/digital camera/keyless remote/hairdryer. Then I call on Ray to serve as my personal IT department. But sometimes, he’s not there.
Thank goodness for my 21st-century 5-year-old, Ava.
While I prefer to flip through pages of our old school, 3-dimensional photo album, Ava scrolls through pictures on an iPod Touch at 60 mph. She uses it to fend off zombies and slice fruit with a ninja sword. She can even blow on it to make balloon animals. She let me try, but all I managed to do was spit all over it.
“How do I turn this damn thing off?” I asked, tapping, blowing and cursing at the ephemeral beast.
Disgusted, she took it from me.
“It’s easy, Mommy,” she said. She did some magic-finger maneuver to turn it off and then silently laid claim to it by dropping it into her Dora backpack. I never use it anyway.
Today’s kids grow up with Leapster and Wii, while I had Etch ‘n’ Sketch and Operation. It’s even worse for my parents. They don’t understand technology at all. Once, Dad tried use a calculator to make a phone call. And when they do try, they act as if it’s a grenade. My mom sweats over typing a document in Word for fear that “it’ll delete itself.” She spends most of the time asking, “What’d I do? What’d I just do? How do I get that back?” I tried to lead her to water by showing her the “undo” command, but I can’t make her drink. In her mind, “undo” and “destroy” are one and the same.
Last week, my friends at www.ModernMom.com sent me a free HP Mini 210 laptop to try out. It’s this new little laptop that comes in an adorable range of colors. I don’t know anything about its operating system or processor, but I know mine is “ice berry plaid.”
“You got me a computer!” Ava cried when she saw it. Given that it’s pink and sized for a Cabbage Patch doll, I could understand her confusion.
“No, Baby, that’s mommy’s,” I said staring at it like the RCA dog. “I just have to figure out how to make it work.”
While I was in the other room on the phone with the HP help desk, I heard Ava laughing. I also heard moaning.
I found her sitting at my brand new laptop, fully engaged in plant/zombie warfare.
“It’s really user friendly,” explained the HP rep.
Sure. If you’re 5.
When Ava was finished, she closed up the laptop and stored it away in her Dora backpack.
The madwoman at work.
