On being 95 years old

Most afternoons, at some point C and I wander out of the office in search of coffee.  99.99999% of the time we end up at Starbucks.  I've had a gazillion people tell me to sign up for their rewards program and I keep forgetting.  Finally I did what any self-respecting Type A would do and listed it as a goal for January.  Well!  After that, what choice did I have?

Is it wrong to include two major coffee chains in one pic??

Here's the thing; when it comes to technology, I'm about 95 years old.  What I mean is that I approach modern advancements in the same way someone who's been around for a century might.  It's not that I can't believe in these advancements, it's that they never seem to work quite right for me.  I mess up some part of the sign-in process or the purchase process and just give up on it already.  I choose to take the high road and believe this technological handicap makes me more empathetic to older people.

Several years ago when cell phones really started to take off, G's grandparents signed up for a cell phone class at their Senior Center.  I wondered if I could sneak in with them, pretending to be their caretaker or something.  Because it's not that I think I'll break something on the phone, it's that I know I will.  You know how you have to turn off phones on planes?  There's always this moment after we land when I truly wonder if mine will ever turn back on.  When it does, I want to smack the stranger sitting next to me and say, Look!  It came back on!  Wowwwwww!

We have a wireless printer and sometimes it just stops working.  If we mess with it enough (no rhyme or reason) it eventually starts working again.  Same with the internet around here.  We've bought about every signal-enhancing gadget known to man, and are probably getting brain cancer as I write this, and I still have to sit on the floor next to the entertainment center, with my computer plugged in to ethernet lifelines, in order to really get it to work.

And it can't just be me.  I mean, does anybody truly understand technology when our main solution to a problem is to turn something off, then turn it back on again?  I wish we could do that with people.  Just sayin.

Yesterday when I asked C to help me out with signing up for the SB rewards program, she eventually got so frustrated she grabbed my phone and did it for me (saying, oh my gawwwwwwwwd).  That was the moment when I considered hiring her as my personal assistant to do things like program the DVR and manage my iPhone apps for me.  It could work, it really could.