So.

Well, here we are.

I've resisted blogging for years, simply because I am completely and thoroughly intimidated by all this newfangled technology. I grew up in the early eighties, when the idea of  "home computers" was just beginning its transition from scifi dream to complete new reality, and the terrifying first wave of "home computers" completely freaked me out.

You know how computer engineers have certain mind set that allows them to write code, build working computers out of tinkertoys, and start Microsoft? I do not have that mindset. At ALL. And so the first personal computers, built by geeks and used to impress other geeks, made no more sense to me then trying to read the future in a flight of birds. It didn't help the first programming languages like BASIC held no more than a passing and superficial resemblance to any language a regular human being might conceviably use. Programming early computers may have been a dream pasttime for some, but for me it was as if Sysiphus had been assigned something even more arcane and pointless then all the boulder-rolling.

Luckily for me there are way more people like me than MIT trained programmers and such, so "user freindly" was quickly shot up the Need  To Do list for the computer creators. So now I have a laptop and can find YouTube and do all the regular things this thing is apparently good for--up to a point.

I still get puzzled and dismayed by things like GoogleMaps. I can't grasp the whole "save a file" thing half the time (I understand it how to do it on my computer but not on another system). I can't understand this "embedding" business.

Not only that, but I am the kind of person who for some reason makes technology hate me on sight. This laptop? It's destroyed two hard drives so far. I hadn't done anything to it--it sat on my desk and suffered my going to Cute Overload a lot, and that was pretty much it. But of the two otherwise identical laptops my husband and I bought two years ago, mine is the one that overheats, burns out, loses the screws that keep the screen on... you name it.

So before you wonder why a forty year old woman is still answering phones at a pizza company, remember that not everybody can just surf this wave of the future, kids. Some of us flail and sputter in the surf, wiping sand from our eyes and wondering if that flitting shadow is perchance a shark. Not everybody's as lucky as you.

(Oh, and I majored in theater. I'm pretty sure that's the other reason I spend my working life asking "so, pepperoni on both sides, then?")

But, as long as this present computer doesn't go up in a puff of smoke, I guess I can keep trying this  blog thingy. Here goes.