Technologically Challenged

It amazes me how long I can work with something and still not know what I am doing.

My father was a programmer for IBM in the days of punch cards. He brought home our first PC in 1979 or '80. It had two games on it, played in DOS. They were question and answer games. When I got an unexpected response, I yelled for my brothers and one of them told me what to hit to fix it.

Six years later I found myself divorced and needing to support my two girls. A woman I had worked with in the past told me to come apply at the insurance company home office where she worked. I took the typing test. The receptionist forgot about me and let me type twice as long as I was allowed, but she didn't want to lose her job so she didn't tell. That allowed me to score the minimum words per minute after errors.

In the interview, they asked if I was familiar with computers. "Oh, yes," I replied. "We have one at home." It still had the two word games on it, and I still needed help when I hit a wrong key, but I didn't tell them that. I got the job.

My job was entering policy information into the system. This required many keystrokes, all of which had to go in exactly the right spot or bad things could happen. Not bad things, like, someone's policy might be wrong. Bad things like the entire system could shut down and not process any information entered in any department that day.

Oops.

I learned quickly. When I made this mistake, it gave me that error message. In no time flat, I knew as many of the error messages and their fixes as the support team. I got promoted.

Eventually, I bought my first PC, an old Apple IIe. It didn't do a whole lot, so I couldn't do much damage. Mom got another used IBM, and I found out you could write stories a lot faster if you didn't have to keep swapping out floppy disks every page or so. I saved and saved and bought a clone. I was up to Windows 3.1 now!

My brother had become a computer tech by this time, and I think he dreaded calls from me as much as calls from work. "What does it mean when it says...?" Then I'd tell him what I had been doing when it happened. Have you ever heard someone go pale before? It's not a pretty sound.

I figured, if I can work on my car, why can't I work on the computer? They both have parts, I am good at swapping out parts! I replaced one alternator four times! In Saturday afternoon phone calls, my brother talked me through installing new CD-roms and modems, but balked at giving me the DOS commands that could really do some damage. I managed anyway.

My brother got out of the computer business (you don't think I had anything to do with that, do you?), and I now have a job where I have to teach new employees how to run the computer end of our new security system. The system that responds to life-saving pullcords and 24-hour door alarms that keep track of our residents. The programmer showed me what to do, when to do it, and left me to write up the instructions.

How do I instill such trust in these people? And why didn't anyone notice that I wrote the instructions wrong the first time around? And isn't it a miracle when someone calls me for help and they actually can follow my saying, "You see that little thingie that is flashing blue? So, you click on that, then you look for the little circle thingie that's flashing orange."

Some people just shouldn't be allowed to play with technology. And they really shouldn't be in charge of teaching others to play, too!