I just got a new Gateway laptop with wireless capability. At the same time I got a Gateway wireless router to connect my desktop with my laptop. Well, this morning it wouldn’t work. I’ve got lots of things to do, but instead I spent several boring hours on hold or talking to tech support at Gateway and at Earthlink. Do this (I did). Do that (I did). They disagreed (should the modem be bridged or not?; is it a smart modem or not?; do I need to contact the ISP or the DSL provider? blah, blah, blah, most of which I either did not understand or barely grasped). Hours later….I just spoke with a tech guy at Gateway who said, “Push the little button on your laptop so it turns blue.” Duh. It works. Unfortunately, the laptop came with no manual to consult on what the little buttons do….it’s all online! And here I was tearing apart the box to look for a manual to consult. I may as well kill myself now and save myself from the embarrassment of an ever more technologically complicated future and save legions of twenty-something tech support people from muttering “What a moron” to themselves.
P.S. I had to tell a younger colleague recently that he had officially become old. I saw him take from our snazzy combination network-printer-high-speed-copier a document that was formatted and paginated exactly as it had appeared in an academic journal. “Neat trick,” I said, “how did you do that?” “I don’t know, I had my assistant do it,” he responded. That made it official.