First up this time was a pretty good column on my old newspaper's Web site.
Circa 1997. I don't know what a 386 is and don't remember owning one. I remember an old, clunky HP laptop and a newer HP. Oh, maybe that's the dead thing in what I laughingly call my office.
(Nope, that's not it. I bought that with my daughter's help. I remember distinctly.)
Since 2007, I've been out here at the kitchen counter where I can monitor the feeder birds and answer the land line.
Now, of course, I actually know what a server is. But I wish I didn't.Fear of physics, technology and other bloodless, sapless thing s
I am a technophobe.
It's partly because of Crazy Alice, the girls' counselor at Omaha North High School, 1960-1962, not to mention many earlier decades.
I had my junior year all planned out so eighth period was open and I could sign up for gym.
That way, in the spring I could run around in blue shorts in the late afternoon sun and tease the boys' baseball team or sneak out early to sit in a car and smoke cigarettes with my boyfriend, who was a senior and had eighth period free because he didn't play sports.
Crazy Alice signed me up for her health class instead.
I learned how to sing the words deoxyribonucleic acid in order to remember it for the final (What is DNA?). And I think someone in the class did a highly interesting project on venereal disease.
I don't remember learning anything about how my body worked, or why, although I'm sure somewhere in there were the four major food groups, tourniquets and germs.
Senior year I figured I'd get the same perks everybody else did who was heading to college or otherwise favored. I could avoid an eighth-period class altogether, meet my boyfriend and still get to my job at the drugstore a half hour early.
Crazy Alice signed me up for physics instead.
It was taught by Mr. Dally, a pear-shaped innocent with whom she was rumored to have been in love in prehistoric times. Of course he was called Mr. Dillydally.
I sat next to my boyfriend's brother by the window, which in the spring overlooked the boys' baseball team. He got me through experiments intended to demonstrate electricity, radio waves, magnets and other stuff.
Outside of letting Shelley Hessler (who later moved to Portugal and speaks the language fluently) copy off my Spanish exams, physics was the only class in which I ever cheated.
Shamelessly.
I managed to pull a D.
It wasn't that I couldn't learn, I didn't want to learn.
How inanimate things work is of no interest to me, things with no souls, no blood, no sap. Also, theoretical things, invisible things like atoms and quarks and black holes whose existence I don't doubt but whose applications in my life I leave to others.
They're frightening things, when you consider that we have reached the stage of understanding that it's entirely likely there are no laws of nature. You know, the Tao of Physics and all that.
At best, technical knowledge is a tool. I have no quarrel with tools like hammers, saws and egg timers whose use is self-evident in their design.
I have an aversion to tools that require me to concentrate and spend hours learning how they work before I can get something done.
Like computers. They're nice tools. It was no great leap from typewriters for me, and I would never choose to leap back.
But I don't want to know, nor do I see why I should know, what a server is. Or a microchip for that matter. Or how they work, or why.
Some of my interests are literature, gardening, human behavior, truth, justice, beauty, love and Italy.
I can use computers to write about those things, and to learn about them, but I don't need to know DOS to do so.
Which is why the gloriously cheap 386 clone I bought more than a month ago from our presentation desk editor still sits in its box on the floor in my home ""office.""
I will have to spend hours learning how to use it, I just know it.
And thanks to Crazy Alice, I really resent that.
DOS. Heh.
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