Running My Life from the Fridge Door

I am not a techie. There, I’ve said it. It’s not something I’m proud of, this guilty little secret of mine.

I have a very basic mobile phone that gets used sporadically. I check emails on the computer out of necessity and not every day. My husband gave me an iPod for my birthday; it sits forlornly in the desk drawer. To date I have managed to add three CDs to it, and absolutely zero songs have been downloaded from the Internet. I suspect the battery is good and flat now.

Perhaps I was born into the wrong generation. I prefer to keep on top of things the old-fashioned way; I run my life from the refrigerator door. It’s true, my kitchen is the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and I am Captain Kirk. The fridge is my control panel; meticulously attached with a variety of fridge magnets is an assortment of notices.

If you have school-age children, you will know all about notices: sports day next week, school camp next term, reminders to put your kids in the correct uniform, school play updates. They’re all there, flapping in the wind.

And those are just the notices from school. If you have children like mine, there will also be a dizzying array of after-school activities to keep track of. Soccer schedules are next to the swimming school timetables, above a reminder to pay for the foreign language classes.

Hovering on the side of the refrigerator is the children’s carpool schedule. It’s a great touchy-feely “reduce-your-carbon-footprint” concept, to carpool. The reality of the logistics involved, however, is akin to landing jumbo jets at a major international airport. I’m already a perpetual taxi driver, ferrying around two busy boys, but coordinating six wee bodies can be a full-time job.

Neatly piled in a stack are the due bills. New bills arrive as fast as I can write “paid” on the old ones. An oil-splattered pile of takeaway menus is nestled next to the stove. The pizza menu is well thumbed; their number is on speed dial. The delivery guy and I are on a first name basis, I tip him well.

Nailed up on the wall opposite the fridge is the second control panel in our household, otherwise known as a calendar. Information is transferred from the refrigerator to the calendar. It’s a proven method that works. We are seldom late or forget where we need to be at any given time. The multipurpose function of the calendar allows you to write information months ahead. What an amazing feature. Laugh if you will, it’s old-fashioned, it’s out of date and it’s way uncool, but heck, it works for me.

My lovely husband, on the other hand, is an out-and-out tech junkie. He wields a mean PDA and is forever scrawling vital bits of information onto its screen, that is when it isn’t attached to his ear. He “gets” how computers work and how to transfer photos onto them from the digital camera.

But there is a problem with all the techno hype. Computers acquire glitches and viruses, mobile phones and PDAs are easily lost, stolen or dropped and smashed. Or, in the case of my husband, the battery failed and some data was lost. So what did he sheepishly reach for? My good old-fashioned address book (my back-up system to the fridge and calendar). Another friend lost a month’s worth of data not yet downloaded onto his computer when he left his PDA on the backseat of a taxi in Vietnam.

I remember as a child my parents saved up their hard-earned dollars and bought electronic items when they could afford them. The color TV was taken home, plugged into the wall and switched on. Aside from a bit of fiddling with the antenna, that was it.

Heck, we didn’t even have remote controls in those days. You had to get off your, ahem, bottom and change the channel (choice of two only). The manual was scant, a couple of pages at most. The same applied to the stereo. Plug it in and put on the LP (vinyl disc, for those of you younger than 35).

My parents did not spend hours downloading the manual and then weeks working out how the appliance worked. They turned it on and instantly were entertained. Call me nostalgic, but I wish it were that easy nowadays. You practically need a PhD to operate the simplest of items, and heaven forbid they break down.

“Better buy a new one, Ma’am. You can’t even get parts for that one now.”

“It’s only two years old!”

Did my parents live in the last generation that was actually able to get things repaired with decent spare parts? We’ve all seen those programs where mountains of PCs and keyboards and god knows what are piled up in the dump. Am I the only one around who thinks this is just plain wrong?

Perhaps they’ll form support groups for us. “Hi, I’m Lois, and I am technically incompetent. I have had this affliction for a number of years but lately it has been coming to a head. I lack the ability to look with lust at the latest MP3 player, Apple Mac, iPod or Wii game, or anything that comes with an instruction manual thicker than a copy of War and Peace. I am seeking like-minded people to provide solace in my ocean of technical ignorance (tea and cookies will be provided).”

Perhaps I can start circulating flyers to drum up interested parties for aforementioned support group. We may have to use old-fashioned phones to contact each other, and (gasp) we may even resort to meeting each other face-to-face and hold actual conversations. You will not find us listed on Facebook, that whole drama of uploading a photo leaves us cold.

So, if you think the 21^st century is whizzing past you and your email inbox is ominously empty, take heart, there are others out there. The anti-techies, we are a small but perfectly formed minority lurking in the wings of cyberspace. You may find us reading a real book or hand writing a letter. You are not alone. We could meet up. I’ll write a note for the fridge.

+ Lois Simon

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