Another Day in the Country
Technical troubles
© Another Day in the Country
Every time I start feeling semi-skillful while navigating my fancy-schmancy phone, the techno fairy sneaks in — even in the dead of night — and does an upgrade.
It’s like waking up with a stranger in bed. Who is this? Can it be my phone? It looks different. Sometimes, mysteriously, the screen saver is even new, and it acts differently.
I’m sure the whiz kids who sit around dreaming up amazing things for a phone to do are thrilled with their discoveries. I’m not.
Just about the time I feel as if I know my phone, it changes. I have yet to have one of those miraculous upgrades be something I really wanted.
What I want from a phone is to be able to call anyone anywhere and remember the number.
I do like being able to text from my phone. In fact, I find myself using that feature more than actually calling to talk to someone — which I’m not sure is a good thing.
I also must admit that I enjoy having Google willing to give me information at a moment’s notice, whether it’s verifying whether someone famous is alive or dead or instructing me how to spell a word correctly.
My trusty camera is now obsolete. The phone does that. I’ve adjusted.
This phone is equipped to be a payment method, but I have trouble trusting it.
This newer model that I got about a year ago has a journaling application. You can talk to the phone, and it records your words — so long as you aren’t too particular.
I did discover quite quickly that while it knows more than I wish it did in some areas, it’s completely at sea in others.
Every time I dictate something that I want to share with my grandson later, it can’t spell his name.
It’s Dagfinnr. And what comes up in the dictation is “dogfood” — close enough, it figures.
The other night, we decided to watch a movie, “A Complete Unknown,” about Bob Dylan.
Like me, my grandson didn’t know all that much about him, but we both knew about, and admired, the young actor who took on the task of playing Dylan in the movie, and I knew a lot of lyrics to Dylan songs that have been covered by other musicians.
I went searching to see whether the movie was available and found it on Hulu.
I used to watch Hulu until I pretty much exhausted what I was interested in on the platform and discontinued the service.
Trying to sign back up turned into an exhausting ordeal. For sure, I would have given up and said “forget it” if Dagfinnr hadn’t been here visiting.
“We can do this, Baba,” he said, and we started verifying that this was actually me doing this with special numbers coming by text and by email, requiring me to move between applications, accounts, services, companies — who the heck knows where and how — and there’s a time limit as to how long this is supposed to take you. The clock is ticking.
“Double-click on that,” my instructor/grandchild said. “Tap and hold.”
How was I supposed to know when to slide left or right, when to pull something up only halfway so that you could see two things at once.
I was so frustrated. No movie was worth this kind of aggravation.
“We could do this on your computer,” Dagfinnr suggested at one point. “Maybe that would be easier.”
The computer had been sitting silent and unused while we were in California, and the mouse had run out of oomph. It had to be charged.
I’d already recharged the keyboard. There’s a waiting line for things that need charging after a trip: the phone, my hearing aids, ear pods, laptop, and me!
“You have to understand,” my sister told Dagfinnr, “when we were your age, the only place there was a phone was in the house or on the corner at a pay phone. That phone service came from one place and pretty much stayed in one place.”
For a phone to be a computer, a camera, a screen to watch movies on, a telephone, a typewriter, a place to store files of information, and a tool for playing endless games with more capabilities than most of us can understand and similar to what were used to put a man on the moon is mind boggling.
“Dealing with technology, Baba, is a learned skill,” Dagfinnr said patiently, “just like any other skill. So in order to be good at it, you are going to have to learn more about it.”
There’s the problem. I don’t want to learn more about it. I just want to know enough so that my phone does what I’ve always needed it to do.
I want the phone to be stable, still, sitting where I can find it to make a call, send a text, take a picture, play one or two games every morning, and tell me the time.
That said, I just acquired another piece of technology — a charging stand. No more messing with cords that are too short or a missing adapter. Just set the phone on the stand and — abracadabra — there’s a piece of technology that I can get excited about on another day in the country.