Sen. John McCain recently confessed that he had not figured out how to use the Internet, and instead relied on his wife and various aides to handle tasks like e-mail and reading political websites and blogs, as well as viewing newspapers online.
McCain says he prefers reading the traditional way, as do I. After all, it’s a newspaper, not a news– screen. Although I’ve been using computers and associated communication devices for years — since 1984 — I feel a certain sympathy.
For years I resisted getting a cellphone. Regular telephones are sufficiently annoying, generally ringing when you’re busy doing something else. Why carry that aggravation around with you?
But one of our daughters in Oregon cut her landline, and found it cheaper to just add us to her company’s family plan. So far, so good. We can talk to her and she can talk to us.
But sometimes I push the wrong buttons and find myself taking pictures. Look, if I want pictures, I’ll use a camera.
And I get complaints that my “voice mail box” is full, so people can’t leave messages. According to the manual, I need a password to access my voice mail. But nowhere can I find how to set the password. My daughter suggested I go to the local outlet for this cell company for instruction. That’s just how I want to spend a couple of hours that might otherwise be devoted to productive work. Or unproductive but pleasant dog-walking or reading. Isn’t this supposed to be a tool that improves my productivity, rather than yet another set of skills to develop that will be obsolete when a new model comes along?
We just got back from a week in Oregon, visiting our daughters and new grandson (who is, of course, the most charming and cute baby there ever was). The last time we flew was about two years ago. This time around, there was something new — self-check-in with touch screens.
I wanted to shout something like, “Hey, I paid for a ticket. If I wanted to do all this stuff myself, I’d take flying lessons.” But given all the security at airports these days, I kept it to myself and we managed without unduly delaying the unfortunate folks behind us.
However, I have to confess that I’m getting more and more perturbed by this “do it yourself” society.
Our rental car in Oregon kept warning us about low tire inflation. I asked the gas-station attendant to check the tires. “They don’t give us tire gauges,” he said. This guy is entrusted with our safety as we sit among thousands of gallons of an explosive liquid, and he can’t be trusted with a tire-pressure gauge?
Apparently, even if an entire state prevents people from pumping their own gas, as Oregon does, you still can’t escape “do it yourself” America. Nor does there seem to be any way to avoid constantly re-learning how to perform mundane tasks like paying bills or using a telephone.
And if John McCain wants to focus on campaigning instead of trying to keep up with a tech world where what you learned last year is often useless this year, then I understand perfectly.
But he doesn’t phrase it that way, and when McCain says his wife and staff take care of such matters, he sounds ridiculously over-privileged. Most of us are forced to keep up or drop out, since we can’t afford to hire people to handle the ever-changing world where we have to do more and more ourselves. And so he ends up sounding dangerously out of touch.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
