Barbara J. Hamby

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Aging in the Computer Age

Instead of griping all the time about all the glitches my computer challenges me with, I guess I ought to express some gratitude for the good things about it.

Looking up obscure events or people just takes a few keyboard strokes and/or mouse clicks. Information from all over the world is available on the web. We don’t have to dust off a heavy dictionary, or search for the right encyclopedia volume that may not be up-to-date enough to have the information anyway.

The best part about the web, is going to faraway places, by investing time only. Places I haven’t been are fascinating and may beckon me to come there in the future. Places I have been are brought back in living color and I can see what has or has not changed. Such scenes bring back many pleasant memories of the trips I’ve been fortunate enough to take.

Certainly there is no easier way to write for a person who has keyboarding experience. Old hands and finger joints resist performing the penmanship displays they once did expertly. Some of my handwriting I can’t read myself.

Moving text around on a screen, adding and deleting, are all easily done on a computer with a good word processing program. My one old electric typewriter collects dust most of the time. Once in a while, I do an envelope on it, if I don’t want to figure out how to run one through my printer. That now long-obsolete machine was once a state-of-the-art combination typewriter and dot-matrix printer. Slow, noisy and cumbersome, its successors are increasingly speedier, quieter and easier to operate (well, maybe not always easier).

Anyway, this is my long overdue salute to the computer age. May it not unduly age me.