I have a love hate relationship with technology and I'm sure the men in my life would agree (those men being husband, son and father, am not counting the dog or the hamster as neither have the opposable thumbs that most gadgets require)
I love a gadget (one of my favourite tv shows is the Gadget Show (back on UK tv screens Feb 1 I believe) I have an iphone, an e-reader, a Garmin run tracker thingummy, an electronic translator, a TomTom, had an MP3 player (or 4) but that's now obsolete with my sexy iphone but with all of these dinky electronic toys I am lost if I can't 'plug 'n play'.
I want to be able to unbox my new toy (have you seen those websites where people take loads of pics/video of themselves unboxing their new toy? How warped and deprived are they?) and then have it work, OK, so maybe I need to charge it up first, I can live with that. But what I really don't like is having to connect it to the laptop/computer whatever, install some software, register online, download some software, download some updates etc before I can play. The reason I hate the delay? It's not because of the time factor (well partly I guess, I can be a little bit 'now, I want it now' at times) but also because you can usually guarantee that if there's some connection required between the toy and a computer then I won't be able to make that connection...
I don't understand it, I'm not a technophobe but I think the problem may be that the gadgets are all Verenaphobes...that's it! It's not my fault at all, the gadgets hate me and conspire against me...
Examples:
The iphone, intuitive? Maybe to someone who's been paying Steve Jobs' salary for the last xx years, but to me? Of course not. I was overjoyed to receive it, then spent hours cussing and swearing at it before working out how to make it function. I didn't know you had to have iTunes installed...this was the first Apple product into the Evans' household (but it's funny isn't it, how insidious these products are, since Christmas and Santa's visit the number of Apples here has doubled) we'd been holding out against the ipod revolution, despite having had MP3 players for years and all our music stored on the harddrive (I'm kept safely away from that).
The Garmin training thingummy. Love it, it tells me where I've run, how far I've run, how slowly I've run and when I stopped and for how long (honest I wasn't catching my breath, I was waiting for the dog to get out of the river, if I ran on and assumed he'd catch up he wouldn't - he's blonde & would probably head off in the opposite direction) But for all that to work well you have to connect it to the laptop which has had the software installed (think my brother did that for me when he handed over the gift, telling me it would make me run further. Ha! It doesn't even make me run faster, I merely note the number of calories used that day and then work out how much cake that equates to) Anyway following on from New Years Eve and the death of the laptop I have lost all that data and the software, now I have to reinstall the software and try to get it working again. Have got the software but not bothered with the trying to install malarkey yet as we've had conditions unsuitable to run in (for me anyway - I've mentioned before about what a fair weather runner I am) I really must get around to doing that, ideally before spring...
The Sony e-reader. Absolutely lurve my e-reader. Love it, love it, love it. Love the size of it - like a dead skinny paperback. The weight (lack of) of it. The fact you can 'turn the pages' whilst holding it in one hand and a cup of tea/glass of wine in the other. The number of books you can have on it (100's). And especially that at any time, night or day you can download a book from the internet and then be reading it within moments...as long as you have the appropriate software on your computer that is. Following on from the death of the laptop we have a new laptop and whilst trying to download a couple of books to read yesterday and failing I remembered the fight I had back in August with it...it was a definite fight, resulting in me stomping off and leaving it for 2 of my 3 men to fix. So now I just have to wait for them to leap heroically into action, until they do I'm back to my bookshelf and my backlog of paperbacks bought last summer before the e-reader appeared in my life.
Technology eh? It hates me!
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