Tuesday, July 5, 2011

THE GIZMOPHOBE...

You may have noticed that my blog (R4) is atypically uncluttered with pictures, icons, URLs, Google ads, Twitter come-ons, YouTube links, dancing rainbow Tasmanian Devils or any of the billion other little cyber-thingies that populate the blog world. Perhaps you suppose that this is due to a disturbing fondness on my part for expanses of abstractly-splotched pink watercolor background, but that’s not it.

No, the reason that stuff isn’t there is because... well, because I am a true gizmophobe.

gizmo·phobia (\'giz-mō-'fō-bē-ə) n.  Fear of or aversion to technology, especially computers and high technology. (See also: Luddite, Neanderthal.)

See, I have a serious fear of all things techie, geeky, nerdy, HTML-y, and so forth. (I suspect this came about because when I was still young and innocent my über-geek brother tried to ram DOS into my brain, leaving me cruelly traumatized and determined to forever avoid anything with a plug.) I don’t like cell phones (just looking at a Droid stresses me out), MP3 players strike me as alien and sinister, and I always offer prayerful thanks when the printer actually prints instead of exploding. (As for changing the ink cartridge... can I have a Xanax?)

In light of this, it should come as no surprise when I confess that as I was setting up my fabulous blog, the actual process of assembling the components filled me with dread. I was confronted with an array of mysterious items: “templates”, “layout width”, “hover color”, and the like. Then, after an hour of tentative key taps to see what might (or might not) happen, I came across an elongated outline that proclaimed, in words striking terror to my very core: “INSERT GADGET HERE”.  

Horrors!

Now, admittedly I’m a bit of a prude, but the thought of inserting gadgets anywhere is waay outside my comfort zone. What kind of gadget?? I didn’t want any stupid gadgets. I just wanted to write posts and have fun and try to be amusing and not be harassed and LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY WITH THE GODDAM GADGETS!!

Then, when I finally thought I’d gotten everything sorted out, I clicked on something called “Preview” to check it all out, and up popped one of those hideous messages that make 21st century life such a non-stop joy:


“Internet Explorer cannot display the page because scrammis bollafip can’t virp splignit when you ick the screeble. Press ‘retry’ to retry, or ‘cancel’ to waste the entire past three hours because you are a lame loser from the previous century who would be more at home attending a husking bee than trying to use a computer. Error message: ICUR12BAtwit.”

Sigh...

I think I’ll go have some prune juice and practice using the can opener.

Until next we meet,
Be at peace.
Lannie Woulff

1 comment:

  1. My GOD, I'm glad you are blogging. It will definitely deepen my smile wrinkles. I, myself, am not a Gizmophobe. I am a Technotard - and proud of it.

    ReplyDelete