Mr Grumpy

Subscribe to my blog

By Mr Grumpy - Fri 27th Aug 2010

 

I have never been a ‘techno geek’ – I just don’t have the understanding, the patience or the intelligence to deal with it. I had never even touched a computer until I was 28 Years old (8 years ago!) and was taught Latin at school whilst other schools were teaching a ‘new fad’ called “I.T.” (Which, we were told, would ‘never catch on’...)

During the interview for my last job in the UK before leaving for the sunny shores of Spain, I was even asked if I was familiar with Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. Naturally, I lied through my teeth and said that I was. It was only after being formally offered the position and collecting my laptop and desktop PC’s that I asked my partner what e mail actually was. She asked me when I needed to know the basics by, and when I asked if a weekend was enough to get me up to speed you can probably guess how unpopular I was.

Once I had made the decision to move to Spain I, Like many others decided to at least try and embrace what new technology there was out there to help me keep in touch with my friends, family and former life in the UK and so started to experiment with so called ‘Social Media’ providers.

I suppose the issue is this – It has taken me 8 years to get my head around the basics of all things Computer, and just as soon as I start to feel confident with what little I do know, then some new technology crops up and reminds me what a techno-imbecile I am ....

Facebook ? – Basically used by a bunch of adolescents posting pictures (digital I might add, which I can’t work out yet) or throwing snowballs at each other, or sending virtual cocktails, or some other random and pointless frivolity. members also seem to obsess about how many 'friends' they can collect and as a result eagerly add the names of random people who they hardly remember and rarely spoke to into their so called circle of friends.

Twitter ?– I haven’t got a clue if I’m honest, seems a blatant means of pointing traffic to your own website. Oh, and you can only do whatever it is you do there with just 140 characters. Celebrities also seem to want to get in on the act and it can seem oddly voyeuristic seeing the likes of Stephen Fry Tweeting that he is about to cut his toenails, or whatever. A good number of ‘Twits’ seem to want to post every little thing that they do, hundreds of times a day – no matter how uninteresting - I believe this is referred to as a case of ‘Twitterhea’ - but again, I don’t really know...

My Space – more of the same, just repackaged and branded differently...

...and a damned site more of them aswell...

After what seemed to be an aeon tweeting and facebooking and spudooking my friends in the UK (sorry, I made that last one up) I decided to regress back to using the e mail and (gasp!) a lesser known and underused invention called the telephone (God alone knows what would happen if I used an ancient and misunderstood practise called ‘writing a letter’ – I’m not sure too many people can actually understand the communication media known as ‘handwriting’ any more...)

I have decided to try and stop pretending that I understand most of the stuff that I ask my PC to do on my behalf and leave ‘Social Media’, or whatever it calls itself, to those who actually understand what it does, what it’s value is, and how to use it – ‘cos that just ain’t me.