The World is Upside Down

I’ve written before about the techno-phobia of my wife.  She has always resisted embracing new technology, be it e-mail or the internet in which she has always depended on me to help her out with, usually when I’m trying to watch a football game.  I changed tactics last year and showed her how to shop on the internet.  While this was moderately to severely irresponsible of me financially speaking – she took to it like a duck to water.  The next step was buying her an I-phone for Christmas.  She was initially daunted but has since embraced it wholeheartedly, following some individual training sessions with both of our kids.  She keeps asking me how certain things work and I repeat the mantra of the kids – keep playing with it and you’ll figure it out.  Again, this was playing to her strengths, first with shopping and subsequently with telephones.  My wife is a true adept a talking on a telephone – something I have always been amazed and sometimes irritated at.  Anyways, yesterday the world got turned upside down because my company changed my blackberry out and issued me an I-phone.  My brother in law is convinced that the I-phone with its ability to connect people to each other and information will go down in history as the greatest invention of our time.   As soon as I walked in the door my wife commandeered the phone and started giving me lessons on its use.  This somehow flipped some kind of switch with her.  She was texting pictures with my daughter and then set up a facetime conversation with one of her friends in Virginia.  All of this was happening without any instruction from me.  When I got back from my evening swim I noted the lights were blazing in our family room.  I found her on the computer engaged in a laugh filled Skype video conference with another friend in Virginia which apparently had been going on for over an hour.  We had done video conversations before but always with people I had set up as contacts, not including this friend.  Somehow she had done this all by herself, I was totally impressed.  She asked me to close it down when she was done and as I was doing so I found a number of screens still open that represented some of her failed efforts to make it happen but I was still so proud of her.  Technology does not come easy to people of our age but she seems to have finally turned the corner.  Shopping and telephones – always play to the strengths!