I sent a panicked text to my tech guy. “Help!” I wrote. “I have a deadline and I can’t figure out why my cursor keeps disappearing.”
He sent me back a text that he was in a meeting and he would call me as soon as he was finished. I starting clicking keys on the keyboard, going into system preferences, trying to figure out the problem until I remembered what he had told me to do. I shut down the computer, unplugged it, waited a few seconds, plugged it back in and turned it back on. There was the renegade cursor. My stomach relaxed and I sent my guy another text to tell him I had figured it out.
This wasn’t the first time this scenario has happened. Or the second or the third. In fact, it has happened quite a few times and it still does. I think I can’t do something, but if I tinker around, breathe and have some patience, more often than not, I solve the problem.
Years ago, I got a new Apple Computer and while I was trying to set things up, I kept running into snags. I had a friend who was very tech savvy at a time when most of us were not. I kept calling him for help. He was generous with his time . . up to a point. He got tired of it and he sent me a cryptic email. RTFM.
What was that? An internet address? A text abbreviation? A hidden message?
It was the last one. A hidden message that went like this: Read The Fucking Manual
I got a little bit pissed off for a moment which quickly turned into embarrassment and then fear. He was through helping me. What would I do? This was before Apple Stores and Genius bars. Before
Google answered our questions and Chat GBT knew everything in the Universe and fed it to us. I took a deep breath, slowed down and read the directions in the manual. I followed them and I figured out almost everything.
I’m part of the “in between” generation, the age group that weathered the transition from analog to digital. A lot of us got left behind. We weren’t born with an iPhone in our hands like kids are today but we’re expected to be able to use them. When I was raised, there were no answering machines.
If you wanted someone to call you back, you had to wait by the phone. There were antiquated things like party lines and an operator who answered the phone when you dialed “O.” Dial being the operative word. Forget about voice mails. Youngsters call us dinosaurs for good reason.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t step up now. Even if it’s hard, I’m determined to keep up with the times. It’s about trusting my brain to figure things out. There are so many things I can do that I think I can’t. So much of it is about attitude. If I’m afraid, if l show up in a panic, I won’t have much chance of succeeding. If my stomach is in a knot and I tell myself I can’t, then I can’t.
Henry Ford said: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
It can be something as simple as learning the buttons on a new television remote. My desktop computer is in the hospital right now so I had to use my laptop to write this blog. The keyboard was
at a different angle, the monitor looked tiny and the cursor was marching to the beat of its own drum. At first I got annoyed, but I slowed my breathing and I started typing. It was awkward but I gave it time and slowly but surely, I got used to it. Well, not completely. My usual bad typing is even worse if that
were possible. I’m wearing out the delete key. But I’m doing it.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
When we try something new and it doesn’t work out, we label ourselves a failure and we give up. Or we don’t. When Thomas Edison was inventing the light bulb, he famously said, “I have not
failed 10,000 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
But that will only be true if you keep on trying.
Don’t throw up your hands and be a dinosaur. If you allow that to happen, you’ll feel disconnected from the world. Take a deep breath and learn how to use your Ring doorbell. Learn how to pay with Venmo and Paypal and Zelle. And one of my favorites: If you do interviews, learn how to transfer the spoken word to the written word on the computer. It took me a ton of tries, four phone calls, eight
steps and some heart palpitations, but I did it. Learning something new can be uncomfortable, but can also be stimulating and satisfying.
Musician Arca said, “When you’re uncomfortable, that’s when you learn something new
about yourself.”
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