Technology is a Dumb Blonde
Jeny Cassady
You know how in every horror film there’s that one character, usually a dumb blonde, who makes the worst choices? Like when she hears a noise in the attic and she thinks, “Gee, sounds like there might be a mass murderer with a big knife and a scary mask on up there in my attic, and with this storm outside, and what with not being able to see because the electricity is out, and nobody knowing I’m here… I think I’ll go to the attic and check it out!”
That’s the sort of scenario I end up in every time I’m faced with a new piece of technology. Only I’m the murderer in the attic, and technology is the dumb blonde going to check it out. And inevitably, it ends up a bloody mess on the floor.
My line of work doesn’t require the use of very much technology. I’m a puppeteer. I work in fun fur and polar fleece, plastic eyeballs and metal rods. My equipment is relatively simple: pliers, vice grip, drill, scissors, measuring tape and a sewing machine. All these tools have been around for decades—some even centuries—and they haven’t changed much at all. From all my years of steady use of these stable and unchanging tools, I’ve become very proficient at their use and maintenance.
It’s the technology that’s popped up within the last 50 years or so that seems to cause me so much trouble. The kind of technology that beeps or talks when you touch it—or don’t touch it enough. The kind of technology that requires you to update every month or so, and then learn about all the new changes. The kind of technology that costs you an arm and a leg to buy and begins depreciating exponentially from the moment you turn it on. The kind of technology that requires a team of experts to fix it.
I prefer to surround myself with the dependable, the reliable, the tried and true. Technology that has stood the test of time… technology that has the least amount of ‘tech’ in it.
My coffee maker is a French press.
My kettle goes on my gas stove… it is not plugged into the wall.
My toaster does not have ‘toast color reader’, anything L.E.D, or even a bagel setting.
Our doorbell is a knocker.
My car is all manual (except for the cassette player, which I broke. And the rear defrost—which only works in patches).
Back when I owned a T.V.—there was one remote—I could change the channel and the volume and turn the T.V. on and off.
The security alarm in our house is creaky front stairs, windows painted shut, and the next door neighbor’s dog.
Our dishwasher has two speeds: two hands, and four.
I feel safe with these technologies, it’s when I’m faced with new technology some kind of crazy reaction occurs. Something in me changes and a sort of SUPERPOWER emerges: My superpower to destroy new technology.
I break things technical. Just ask my sister. She builds websites. When she finishes a new website for a client she gives it to me and says, “Break this.” So I do. I’ll find the really small teensy tiny little glitch that may not have showed up for months or years – or may not have been found at all!! But I’ll find it. Break it.
I’ve never owned a microwave. Yesterday when I was trying to re-heat my leftovers in the office microwave I couldn’t seem to get it to warm evenly. “Is it broken?” asked a co-worker when I mentioned I was having difficulties. “No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so. I don’t know. I’ve never owned a microwave—I could be doing it wrong.” But then I thought… maybe I broke it.
I break things, not really knowing how. I’ve managed to break our washing machine, my computer, my printer, a microwave, our new fridge, and websites. My mother’s convection oven has never been the same since I burnt cookies in it a few Christmases ago.
I don’t get this from my parents. My father is a fixer. He can fix anything. When I was in third year University, I called him at 3:00 in the morning in a panic because I couldn’t get my dot matrix printer to print. I had a paper due in the morning. Half asleep and without leaving his bed he led me through every place the problem could be. Finally, when nothing else worked, he instructed me to stand in front of my printer (which was on the floor), and kick it. The printer sprang to life.
My biggest problem seems to be cell phones. In the last three years I’ve managed to break four.
Cell phones have been causing me a great deal of grief since I met my boyfriend in 2006. Back then I had a perfectly good cell phone. I could call people, and people could call me. That’s what a phone is supposed to do. Right? Well that’s what I thought until Figgis* put his phone in my hands and began showing me all the things it could do.
Do you remember the original Star Trek series? (Or maybe you’ve seen the re-runs? Why must I continually date myself???) That series was around WAY before cell phones, and the coolest thing on that show was the communicator. It allowed you to talk to other people, take readouts of things, look up information… well, Figgis had put one of those in my hand and my mind just snapped! He opened my eyes to the awesomeness of the technology that was the cell phone! So I surrendered my perfectly serviceable 20thcentury phone technology for one of these new fancy mini computer phones.
I used it for calling people.
It was about this time I discovered my superpower, and the slaughter began.
I never did figure out everything that phone could do. However, I managed to kill the battery within a month. The second battery I killed a month later. I took to carrying around a charger… I’d have to plug myself in if I needed to make or receive a phone call. I received sideways glances, snickering and even pointing with laughter, at the sight of me attached to an outlet in SEARS.
My next phone was a flip phone—cool! And I learned a very important lesson with that phone: never, NEVER place one in your back jeans pocket because when you pull your pants down in the ladies room the phone might just slip out of the pocket and into…
The third phone was awesome!!! It did everything AND it was silver and shiny and pretty! And I washed it the second day I had it. Washed it in the new front-loader, on hot. It stopped working. The reply I got from the tech department was: “Phone not fixable, this model not designed for washing in hot water. Next time try cold.” Maybe should have put THAT one in the toilet!
Phone #4 would crash if I looked at it. Figgis tried to fix it but finally gave up saying “This phone is fu@#$%ed. What did you do to it? Technology hates you.”
I’m four months into phone #5. It’s going pretty well. Can’t figure out how to access all my phone numbers, and haven’t been able to phone my message service, but it has only crashed once. So I’d call this one a success.
Really, I think everything would be fine if technology would just leave me alone. Stop investigating that noise in the attic, and just let that horror movie mass murder be. I don’t want to destroy technology—it’s not an easy superpower to have. I can’t save anyone’s life, people look down on it, and it causes me a lot of stress.
I think I’ll try and stick to the more simple things technology has to offer—like the hammer, and the carving knife—and stay away from my parents’ blood pressure machine.
*not his real name—fake names used to protect the technically able.