Laziness and learning

Incremental steps

I am one of the ultimate troglodytes in anything digital. I didn’t used to be so bad but i developed lazy habits, justifications fed by the pretense I was too busy to take the time to learn things. Few questions set me off for years as much as ‘Did you look at the manual?’ since anyone and everyone who has ever known me is well aware that I am the most intuitive human ever so a manual is way too logical, slow, and frankly annoying. A good product is one a person can figure out without a bloody manual but by common sense, she says.

I felt a great satisfaction when new products no longer included a manual, until I came to appreciate that merely meant one had to find the manual online which was an additional step. Somehow I had surrendered by that point to internet searches.

What was originally laziness thus put me decades behind learning fundamentals. It made the last years of teaching tougher and certainly no less for some aspects of my personal life. I am, as a result, clunky (at best) at grasping some of the terminology and basic interactions with computers, cameras, digital televisions, and the like.

I have been lucky enough to have several colleagues who forgave me for my bad behaviour over the years by learning that answering my ‘how do i…’ questions was probably in the national interest versus forcing me to learn to do it myself. I know several of them read this so I will publicly acknowledge my sins and bow down in true thanks for their help. Believe it or not, I did ultimately try most of the things you suggested I try. (Yes, Dennis, I did learn to sign digitally.)

I am especially lucky, though I did not always appreciate it, that my brother is both tech savvy and virtually unending in his patience at my questions. I realised he was tech savvy when I lived in Ithaca nearly 40 years ago before cable was ubiquitous. As he explained to me, cable was created for places like Ithaca which were remote, off the grid in a manner of speaking, and still deserved tv. I knew that Ithaca did have a cable company so it was all going to be ok.

What alerted me to my brother’s brilliance was when he suggested the appropriate Beta recorder (yes, I am indeed a recovering Beta person and I lived to tell the tale). This was before we had virtually free telephone calls so I had actually sent him something called a letter to ask his thoughts (not even realising how much he knew about this stuff) on getting one of these machines I was reading about. He asked for a cheque, then this box arrived at my house from Arlington, Virginia where he lived. Amazing.

Except I had no clue how to hook it up. I actually opened the instructions which were probably still only in one language back then. That thoroughly confused me. So, I bit the bullet to call him. It was a Saturday in the winter (which can be from November to May in Ithaca, of course) as I remember how dreary it was.

He did not have the machine in front of him but he walked me through it in about 6 minutes. I could not believe it. He used me as the vehicle to hook up the Beta recorder and then return the system to a point where I was receiving cable signals so I could decide on watching live or recording. This was a gifti could not believe humans had.

I never stopped listening to his tech ideas again. I can’t always explain what is wrong as I don’t get the terminology right but I am uniformly confident he will find an answer so I try explaining my problems to him.

And he had subtly shamed me into using online resources. Instead of ‘Did you look at the manual?’, I know I will get ‘You know, the online forum for Fuji covers a lot of topics like that. I am sure you checked that…..(long pause)’. So, I have learned to check things. Makes my pleas for help more effective.

And I actually solve things for myself these days.

And they are absolutely amazing resources. Turns out there are other people like me who don’t know anything up to everything. There are people who do know everything, of course, but some who knew less than me. And for photography, there is a world of expertise that makes my head tingle with excitement. I still come across things I don’t understand how to do but often the old ‘on/off’ trick helps.

I came close to stumping him yesterday when I found an icon on my camera (he is the one who got me into this camera obsession anyway) that neither of us could identify. I looked for well over an hour, never finding anything remotely like this symbol. He told me yesterday morning he couldn’t find it, either. Woohoo! Vindication!!

So we started with a brand new card this morning. And it was a glorious sight to see the picture it produced.

I simply cannot thank him or the many others who help me with digital technology. You are the best, truly amazing folks all.

These conversations often lead me to reconsider my photos from the past as I make yet another place to store them for fear something will happen to the 8 places I have them now (in the cloud, on hard drives, on multiple devices, in multiple online sites).

Following yesterday’s conversation and follow on texts this morning, I went back to some of my most favourite photos. In Lerwick, the capital of Shetlands, is a beautiful but small park with unbelievable flowers. I admired those shots again this morning as they are so spectacular in what seems a remote, relatively forbidding area.

Within my laziness is also an obsessiveness about revisiting what I find most beautiful. I hope you enjoyed it. See you tomorrow. Be well.FIN