Once You Know How, Everything Is Easy

  

   In a cartoon I saw recently, a dad is feeding his infant child in a high chair. The dad says, "When you get a little older I'd like you to help me with a couple of problems I’m having with my computer." There's some truth in that, but on the other hand, I read once about a teenager who was given a Sony Walkman and was told there were sixteen songs available on the device. He could only listen to half of them because he didn't know he had to flip the cassette over.

   There was no good reason for the teen to spend time figuring out the machine because he had an infinite number of songs available on his phone. If he took the time, he would eventually have figured out how to get the last eight songs on the cassette, but the payoff was not there.

   It seems ridiculous when people say such and such a device or program is intuitive. A spear is intuitive. If you and your clan need to take down a wooly mammoth, a spear is just the thing. A bow and arrow is not intuitive. "You expect me to stop two tons of raging beast with this dinky thing? Give me a spear!"

   But then your son meets a girl from the bow and arrow clan, and yes, with a bit of practice that dinky thing will indeed do the job. Plus, the rate of being trampled by mammoths is much lower in her clan. The real reason kids are so much better than adults with new devices is that kids have all the time in the world. If they tap in the right sequence, they get lights, music, and pictures of new things to buy.

   Kids in their explorations learn all the ins and outs of a device. So many problems for adults come from little glitches in the program, not because the adult is stupid. There is always a workaround for every problem. Kids know the workaround. "How did you do that?" says grandpa. "Let me write that down."

   The last device I truly mastered was the camcorder.  We had three young kids at the time so recording their antics was the big payoff. I rented one from the video store at first. It weighed as much on my shoulder as the leg of a wolly mammoth. But it did what I wanted it to do.  I had already mastered our VCR player, because I loved movies. 

   The owner's manual for the camcorder was confusing, but I studied hard on it because I wanted to edit my movies.  Right after getting that down, TV remotes got confusing. You had to have two or three of them.  Who needs this grief just to watch some mindless pablum on the TV. I have books. Books are intuitive.

   Our collection of home videos of the kid's cute babbling and our trips with them around the country, sat in several boxes behind the TV. Number 2 son said if I bought an external hard drive, he would put all the tapes onto the drive then put them onto compact discs. Tapes were becoming obsolete and would eventually deteriorate. He took our collection of tapes plus a check for a hundred dollars and got to work. That was fifteen years ago, maybe twenty.

   Every so often I asked him how it was going. He said he had gotten all the tapes onto the hard drive, but had not yet transferred them onto CDs. He said it had been a blast watching his life pass before his eyes.  I didn't push him. He was busy in college. Then he had a job. Then he had a girlfriend. I would ask about the CDs occasionally but I still didn't push him. He got a family, then a house. Just recently he surprised me with a zip drive that contained all of the videos from the tapes. He had given me back the actual tapes long ago. They're sitting behind the TV. The zip drive was plugged into a dongle which would allow me to make the old tapes appear magically on our TV. He told me how to do this but I didn't understand a word. Maybe I'll just fire up the old VCR and watch a tape, if I can get the remotes to talk to each other.

If zip drives could only talk.