Thursday, January 16, 2014

What Surface?

"My husband and the boys got me the Surface for Hanukkah," I tell a good friend.
"What's that?" she asks.

Exactly....
At least I know what it is. 

And now I know why it's called the Surface. It spends much of its time being moved from one to another, its sleek visage dark with unopened promise. My stress and frustration of how to wrangle it into submission informs my morning as I give up and open my iPad to check my emails and read the NY Times.

"Why aren't you using our gift?" My older son asks one morning. 

I'm a Jewish mother--I'm the one whose supposed to be doing the guilting. Apparently I've taught him well.

"I'm working on it," I say, looking at my morning image reflected back at me in the black glossy surface--reason enough to turn the darn thing on. 
With a flick of the on button, the screen transmorphs into a graceful sky dotted with moving cubed images that pop up in a motion-sickness inducing dance.

All I want is to read the paper with my coffee, but I can't seem to click fast enough on the NY Times icon before it graphically disappears like a teasing game of floating carnival ducks.

If I only had a pop-gun.  

The inherent stress of new technology is the pressing need to master the latest device before it is made obsolete by the newest iteration on the market. This is a thrill that resonates with a lot of geeks and some everyday people. But for those of us who have been clinging desperately to our BlackBerry and only recently agreed that an iPhone is a MUST, this race to technology has me breaking out in hives.

As a child of parents who have used the same brand of toothpaste and coffee for well over fifty years, let's just say change comes slowly.

To my devoted husband and wonderful sons who so thoughtfully want to make my writing more mobile with a surface that has a keyboard that's three inches big instead of the twelve inches I've grown accustomed to on my laptop, I respectfully say I just need some time. And by any chance did you momentarily confuse me with the mother/wife you want me to be? Because I'm pretty sure I bake the best chocolate-chip cookies and marble loaf you've ever had, and fairly certain that Geek Mom does not.


My next son, home from college on winter break walks into the kitchen, rolls up his sleeves and grabs the Surface. "C'mon, Ma, let's do this thing."

I burst out laughing.

Have I mentioned that this son knows even less about technology than I do and has managed to crash  two computers, one of them an Apple, which is something I've been told is pretty much impossible to do?

I look at my Kafka-reading, technologically-impaired son who loves Beethoven and Sinatra and tell him to move aside.  

I look the Surface square in the eye and say, "Come to Mama. It's time."







1 comment:

  1. Hi!!!! Your daughter, happy Surface owner here! HELLO!!! You can ask me!

    ReplyDelete