Monday, May 4, 2009

Caught up in "the Web"

In high school, I met my first computer. I learned to write stupid little "Basic" programs--cursing each stinking comma and misplaced "and/or"--that eventually succeeded in drawing useless pictures on the screen. Let's just say the machine and I did not particularly enjoy each other. Then in college, my roommate had a (clunky, desktop-covering) computer I was allowed to borrow for typing papers. A glorified word-processor, if you will. I told it what to do, it obeyed, and we got along just fine (except when it occasionally rebelled and ate my work, but what can you do?). Now I sit here with my laptop, answering e-mails, updating my Facebook status, checking whether the O's won, reading celebrity gossip on People.com, playing a quick game of Bejeweled, getting an update on the forecast for tomorrow, and...where was I? Oh yeah, writing my blog entry! I can't even imagine anymore how we stumbled through life, in the dark, dismal time B.I. (Before Internet). I do vaguely recall hours of torture in the library, scouring the CARD CATALOG for reference books, searching the shelves, and taking notes (with pen! and paper!). Mostly I've blocked this out for my own sanity. Remember dictionaries? My dad had a hardback one that must have weighed 25 pounds. And encyclopedias? Yep, we had a full set, A to Z. Scary, dark times, those were! My children don't know how lucky they are--when I asked my father a question he didn't immediately know the answer to, he would bark, "Go look it up!" Now it's more likely to be: in 9-year-old-speak, "Don't worry Mommy, I can just Google it!" Or as the 5-year old says, "Which dot-com should I type in?" Progress...

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