Help. I've fallen and I have no cell phone.

I teach seniors how to use computers. Being a senior myself, I think this gives me some seniority in the matter, plus the fact that I started out in the biz when computers read (and ate) punch cards. To sort cards you had to understand how to plug wires into a patch panel underneath the sorter. Or, if you were too scared to do that, you could sort them by hand.

In fact, I had a computer burst into flames one night. Well, that's a bit of a stretch: a few wisps of smoke and the smell of electrical fire permeated the computer room when a resistor or a capacitor decided to burst. Fortunately, I was not to blame, but it made me more respectful of the power of computers to cause gut-wrenching panic.

We are now thoroughly into the age of the cell phone, even though we don't know for sure whether these things are killing us. Since you can now watch feature length movies on your cell phone, there's not much holding us back from being thoroughly immersed in cell(ph)-absorption.

What amuses and amazes me is the number of my older students who come into the lab knowing square root of minus one about computers, despite having no trouble dealing with the tiny, inconvenient buttons and displays on their cell phones. Of course, they forget to turn the damn things off (a skill they have yet to master), so each session is inevitably disturbed by someone's choice of annoying ringtone music at random intervals, despite the signs on three walls asking that they be considerate of others by turning off their cell phones. Or at least setting them on stun.

Well, when I say "no trouble", I mean, relatively speaking. For one thing, they forget which pocket or section of the purse or pants the phone is stashed in. This can sometimes lead to complete performances of a ringtone opus until the battery wears down or the device comes to hand.

Most seniors, however, display basic courtesies when taking a call. After all, they grew up before the right to privacy was shredded. Back in the day, no one would THINK of discussing a private matter within earshot of strangers. In one class last year I had a student in the middle of the room who took a call from the phone company and settled in to a discussion of a billing error, complete with credit card numbers. One of the other students finally told her to take the call elsewhere. (I suppose that was my job, but I'm not an authority figure).

The other day at the physiotherapy center, I waited for J through about an hour and a half of her treatment. Although I was able to absorb about fifty pages of Leo Buscaglia's 30-year old book, "Personhood", it took considerably more concentration than usual, owing to a cell phone monologue provided by a woman who was clearly trying to sort out someone else's life. One of the many blessings of senior living may well be diminished hearing acuity. An elderly lady who brought her husband for therapy sat absorbed in her paperback for the whole time. When her spouse reappeared, he came over to her and tapped her on the shoulder. She probably got through a hundred pages.

Just in passing, it appears that a too-loud ringtone can set off a feedback loop in a hearing aid. Very unpleasant, because you now have to deal with two miniature sets of controls, located in two different areas of the personhood.

There are a few of my students who will never master anything more difficult than a can opener. Nevertheless, they continue to try their best to understand a technology that claims to be simple, but is becoming more complex with every iteration. One of them is bringing her twelve year old granddaughter to class with her, presumably because she knows that a kid who has been born in the late 90s is intuitively able to fix whatever goes wrong. I think the granddaughter mostly instant messages her friends during the sessions, but I could be wrong. She is probably, like most kids, multitasking, a computer geek term that means doing several things at once. Certainly she asks pertinent questions at times.

I will have taught myself out of a job in another two years, I think. Already we are seeing that in some classes where twelve register, only three show up. Perhaps in the few weeks that they were waiting for the class, they learned how to google and satisfy their own curiosity. I always make a point of teaching how to use Google, because it is the most easily understood (and fastest) way to learn how to do something. Once they can google, they don't need me anymore. And that's a good thing.

And by the way, Google generally doesn't like the word google to be used as a verb. You could look it up.