FAMILY MATTERS by Jude Dobson

Intuition soothes techno tangle
I am a dinosaur. I had suspected I'd developed "not keeping up with it'' tendencies, and this has been confirmed. It is in a specific field, phone technology. Although, when one's 6-year-old daughter tells you she needs to choose your wardrobe in the morning because "you've got it wrong again, Mummy'', it's possible that other areas of my life
might need attention.
Recently, both my mobile phone's handpiece and Sim card "died''. In the two weeks before I got a new phone I had four different loan phones. Like strollers and car seats, every brand of phone operates in a different way. My ability to text was profoundly affected - the space button was in a different spot, as was the spelling function. I am
a predictive texter so it drove me insane when I couldn't get the word I wanted spelled correctly.
The fact that one's contacts list does not exist is also a small problem. Yes, a few contacts were salvageable from the very dead phone by my patient (tech-savvy) husband who stored them on his PC at work. Now, though, I need to figure out how to get them off that site onto the new permanent phone.
In the meantime, I've put in all the numbers I actually know, which were my family and a couple of friends. With the proliferation of mobile ownership, once you put contacts' numbers into your phone you have no hope of remembering what any of them actually are. The numbers I remember are probably those I rang often before speed dial was invented!
And so to the new phone. I am a lucky girl because I have an i-phone. Lucky, because the other day I read demand is so great for them worldwide that the manufacturer cannot keep up with demand. Now buyers face a frustrating wait.
I promised my dear husband that, this time, I would actually read the instruction booklet and get to grips with the phone's marvellous capabilities, so as not to bother him. We used to have the same model phone and he was a handy go-to person when phone hassles struck (well, operator issues, to be honest).
With previous phones, other 50-page manuals were looked at briefly when the box was opened, but, otherwise I confess, they were left unopened. I would figure the level of
capability I needed then stop. This time, I vowed to be all over the technology. However, this time, the "manual'' was just a small fold-out pamphlet, read in five minutes. The
rest, I am reliably informed, is "intuitive''.
AHHH! Well, herewith the age gap shows itself. Here I was ready and willing to read a veritable tome of information on the functionality of the phone. Read, then do.
Our 14-year-old just does the "do'' bit. After a few minutes with the phone she shows me all sorts of things it can do. "Stop, stop,'' I say. "I have to do it myself or I will never learn.''
So I do, until I come unstuck on a new function and have to ask her for help. I watch her use her thumb and index finger to zoom in or out on an image, and ask her how she knows to do that. She just knows. She takes a video, loads a photo she took of the
dog as a screensaver then shows me how to get it to ring someone by speaking their name into it. All in five minutes. God, I feel extremely old and scaly. Then she asked me if I wanted to move all the icons around, moving all the jiggling wee boxes as she spoke.
"No, just leave them where I last saw them,'' I say feeling exhausted by the speed at which things were moving.
I know technology is meant to make things easier, not harder, but sometimes I wonder. Perhaps when I'm comfortable with sorting the basics, I will want to know how to get
a still photo off the video. This is the question the 6-year-old asked the 14-year-old, who said, "Yes, of course.'', as she wanted a photo on her wall of a very particular part of the
video she had just seen.
I've got the basics sorted and, hey, I'm happy with that thus far. Next thing is setting up email on my phone. I'm told that it is best to use iMap and Gmail. Help.