Casual

...You won't find me plugged into an iPod or checking into the Mayo Clinic for the first cell-phone implant, but should you see me using the computer check-in at O'Hare or doing some other mildly high-tech operation you might note a certain smugness in my manner...

...Many people are born with a natural curiosity about how things work...

...Where I do often run into trouble is remembering from one season to another how to make minor adjustments on modestly high-tech equipment...

...word-processing when a typewriter had served them so well over the years...

...When science became at all intricate, when it left the state of simple wonder, my mind departed the room...

...I have friends, a couple, retired physicians, who have a highly complex arrangement of multiple computers, yet have concluded that they cannot handle the relatively simple mechanics of ATM machines...

...I feel telephone technology generally is vastly overdone, and I've never met a telephone menu I didn't dislike...

...When I asked the wife what they do to obtain cash, she said that each month they just take out a stack of money— the amount was not specified—and put it in a drawer, and use it as their own personal ATM...

...I, alas, wasn't...

...I'm always pleased when I am able to avail myself of the most recent bit of new technology that life throws up nowadays...

...Adding software to my computer is always an adventure, one that not infrequently ends up in frustrated anger—"I sense rage," as the shrinks say—at my own ignorance...

...Man rides machine," wrote Emerson, who never had to ride any machine more complicated than a train...

...Nor could I lose myself in the intricacies of Lincoln Logs, an Erector Set, or test tubes and chemicals...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...I've learned to replace batteries in my and my wife's wrist-watches, saving four or five bucks each time by being able to do so...

...It makes me feel I'm still in the game...

...I have a number of friends, contemporaries, who dropped out some while ago, most at the stage of home computers, which they decided they didn't really need...

...Bring 'em on, I say...

...Not, to be sure, that all of it is absolutely required...

...I felt myself a wizard of my old VCR, then made a mistake and bought a higher quality, more complex one—with a voice that uttered instructions—that left me baffled...

...I can handle very minor plumbing jobs...

...I was not a boy who could make model planes...

...I discovered I have an eye for hanging pictures true...

...Google when they lived so close to a library...

...Several decades later, it has yet to return...

...Why did they need email when the phone was at hand...

...I have learned how to replace halogen bulbs...

...They said I was low-tech, but that was just a lie...

...I, for one, don't need a remote at my bedside to put the lights on in the bathroom should I wake in the middle of the night...

...Yet I take great pride in being able to do simple tasks around our apartment...

...None of this qualifies me for being on a first-name basis with the crowd down at Home Depot, but I derive small but genuine satisfaction from doing such tasks...

...Yesterday, to avoid the long lines, I used the recently installed automated system and checked myself out of my local supermarket: two pints of Haagen-Dazs frozen coffee yogurt, three rolls of white necessary paper, a package of six Bays English muffins, a small bag of vine-ripened tomatoes...

...left alone with an X-acto blade, I would probably have greeted the digital age with many fewer digits...

...The prig Thoreau, seeing us frustrated by technology, would probably have said, as it seemed to please him so much to say, "I told you so...

...I fear that they do—that we all do...

...One small step for man, I felt, one large step for Joseph Epstein...

...I think that something more is at stake than the greater efficiency that technological change sometimes brings about...

...At daylight savings time, I can be counted on to forget how to change the digital clock in my car...

...Some of us are selectively stymied by the fresh advents of the new high tech...

...I doubt he would have felt the same if his car had broken down on a major thoroughfare owing to an electrical failure...

...My curiosity has always been restricted to how human beings work, not that I have been all that successful in satisfying it...

...But a lot of these gadgets have made life easier, a tad happier, a bit better...

...or if he'd been rendered unable to write a sermon because his computer had gone down...

...After bagging my groceries, I moved on out, smartly...

...Come a bit closer and you might hear me lightly singing, "you ain't nothin' but a houndog...

...A few years ago, I changed all our bedroom and bathroom doorknobs...

...Who needs it, they exclaimed...

...Following instructions, I used my preferred customers card, I scanned each item, I paid in cash, I took my change...