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.

If you teach it they won't come

In my line o' work, I have 12 seats to fill three times a week in a computer lab at the local public library. When I started out five years ago, I filled them five to eight times a week, teaching how to use Windows 2000, and the basic how-tos about Microsoft Office programs. Now, into the sixth year, there are evident signs that I've done a good job: five people will sign up and two will come. And sometimes one of them won't have signed up for the class.

Of course it's possible that I've just become old, doddering and tiresome. Some days I really am tired, and it's hard to work up the enthusiasm of youth. But on a normal day, teaching is still what I like to do, because over the years, I think I have evolved from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.

There's a wonderful social side to all this, too. Some of my "students" have attended over 100 classes (in a few cases almost 200). They haven't mastered the computer, but they love to forgather and "learn something new every day".

Personally, I think they learn the most from each other. Some classes begin with one of them talking about something that they've just recently learned, or something that has happened to them, or someone they know. One gentle former teacher hands out vitamin C candies to anyone who wants them. And if one of them has a bout of hospitalization, they all want to know the details. This is not an ordinary class. Where else could you have someone talking about rehabilitating a goldfish that got speared by a great blue heron in a garden pond and can't swim because of a punctured swim bladder, and then everyone looks up Ardea herodias and becomes an instant expert on the subject?

I've been told that the attendance issue would be resolved if the library charged, say, $10 a class, refundable if you show up. No doubt it would be. Nobody would come. Many of the people who attend can't afford that money, because they're out of work, and the reason they're enrolled with me is that they hope to learn enough about spreadsheets to compete on the job market with the hundreds of twenty-somethings who have grown up with computers. Some have worked for thirty years of loyal office drudgery only to be downsized, laid off and not qualified for the kind of computer work that involves knowing Office and other programs. Windows is a mystery to them.

One older woman attended about eight classes before she sold her computer. But her daughter wouldn't let her off so easily. The lady showed up again a year later for another few sessions because her daughter got wind of the situation and gave her a computer for Christmas.

Most of my seniors would agree that you can't learn from a relative. My wife has learned not to ask me too many questions for exactly that reason: I'm the soul of patience with the library crowd, but I become short-fused when I have to come home and work through similar stuff with my nearest and dearest. I'm not sure why that is, but it's typical.

When I ask my students if they have anyone who can help them with their home computer, they'll say, "Oh, yes, my son/daughter installed the whole thing for me, but then, you know, they said 'You just press this and click that and move this over here and you'll be fine'. And you know, I STILL don't know how to get on the Internet or do email."

Some of the job seekers actually end up taking whatever I'm able to give them initially, and going off to a community college to do more detailed work. But for most of the rest of us, I suspect that the computer eventually begins to gather dust like an old doily, and when they pass on, the offspring dispose of the computer rather than being burdened by it.

Well, in the Cincinnati area at least, there is the Cincinnati Computer Consortium, and they recycle the old stuff so that eventually nobody will have to teach seniors how to use a computer. And, apart from the loss of social contact and interaction, that might be a good thing. When you're over 65, it's not necessarily fun to learn all this new technology, but it does open up possibilities for your declining years that may just keep you interested, and therefore alive. And that is a good thing.

Cud-chewing

You know, one of the neat things about cows is that they have four stomachs. I just came back from a Mexican restaurant here in Greater Cincinnati and let me tell you folks, I can see a great disadvantage in the way we're designed. I ate enough for three. Three enchiladas and a 22-ounce draft... Thin people aren't built for that kind of intake. It was good, and it got me to thinking.

I don't know, not being a farmer, whether cows can overeat or not. They certainly turn digestion into a cottage industry. At some point, they regurgitate the grass, hay and whatever else they've ingested, and that's when you'll find them contentedly grinding that initial load, usually for a considerable time, until with a final gulp or two, they send it on its way to the other three. And we all know how that comes out.

I was teaching a class today of seniors using computers, and the subject of email abuse came up (e.g. forwarding dumb jokes to people and thereby displaying their addresses to everyone else, rather than using the BCC to maintain their privacy). That led to the mention of failure to attach items (like pictures) that you've stated are attached. So I suggested that the simplest way to prevent that is not to address your email until you've written, checked and attached.

Email is the symptom of a culture that has no time to ruminate.

Sure, it's efficient, and sometimes effective, but somehow the bulk of it is just that. Bulk. No time to chew on what we've written: little time to digest what's been read. Hit reply all and you're done. Move along... nothing to see here.

Consider the cows of the field. They eat, they repeat, they digest. Those big eyes follow the farmer as he, their slave, cleans up after them, feeds them, milks them, breeds them, and ships them off to their fate which they most likely don't give much thought to, unless one of them dies in a field, or they lose a calf.

Are cows the philosophers of the phields?

And so, following along these lines, I decided to waste some electrons on some of my own stomach rumblings, if only to compel myself to sit down and consider timeless questions, such as, "Is this the good life, and am I living it?" Or maybe some more trivial pursuits, such as "Why am I still working at 65 when all the successful people are floating around the Bahamas, some of them in boats?" I realize that blogging is injurious to your health. It eats time that you could have spent walking.

It is in the nature of blogs that you start out all a-quiver with creative juices gushing, and after not too long, it melds from a Serious Beginning through a Daily Obligation and finally becomes Orphaned File. Well, fine. Everything has a beginning and to everything there is a season. Or, as my dad used to say, "Your grandfather never criticized anyone, but if he did say something sharp about someone, he'd end with, 'There! I've said it, and I'm glad'".

And so, when this blog has no more cud to chew, I'll have said it. I hope I'll be glad. And I hope you will be too.