JOAN’S MEMORIAL HOLIDAY WEEKEND BLOG – MAY 24-26, 2008 – THE NEW CELL PHONE – WHO WILL HELP ME FIGURE IT OUT?

Before Alzheimer’s Disease struck, my husband was a techno whiz. He graduated from a technical school, where he learned the “inside and out” of electronic equipment – how it worked; how to fix it; how to adjust it. Between 1968 and 2000, before AD started to creep into his brain, he owned and managed electronic stores. His understanding and expertise started with tube TV’s and ended with DVD/CD players and digital TV’s. What he never learned to grasp was the concept that NO ONE ELSE in the world understood how those things worked, nor could they figure out the manuals. They, myself included, just wanted to buy the thing, take it home, plug it in, and have it work. When that miracle did not occur, and the irate customer inevitably stormed into the store, slammed the box on the counter, and shouted, “This thing doesn’t WORK”, my husband would ask, “Did you read the manual?” 

It always drove him crazy that people would stare at him in shock and say, “NO, I just want the thing to WORK!” Sid understood every word in those convoluted, lengthy, boring, impossible to decipher encyclopedias, and he could not comprehend why no one else did.

Now, sadly, he doesn’t understand them either. So when I bought a new cell phone this week that came with a 132 page instruction manual, he was very upset that he couldn’t read it and tell me how to use all of the fancy phone features. He said that I was intelligent enough to read it and figure it out. HA! That’s what he thought. I tried. Two nights ago, I opened the manual, took one look at it, and decided that I was tired, and it was too late in the evening for me to tackle it. Since then, I have fiddled with the phone, touching this pad and that icon with the handy little stylus, and figured out how to set up my voice mail; get on the Internet; send e-mail; and take a picture. All without opening the manual.

Friday night I decided to try the manual again. That lasted 5 minutes. I was able to follow the numbers that pointed to buttons on the phone, so I now know that the side button raises the volume of the caller’s voice (I think). He was sitting there watching me, slipping into his “manager” mode, chastising me for not reading the manual.

As an educator, I have always recognized that everyone has strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Some people, like myself, don’t “get” math and science, while others like my husband, understand technology, but cannot write a coherent sentence. He was never able to understand that. I thought having AD, and losing the technical expertise he always possessed, would have made him more sympathetic to those of us who have never had it, but it didn’t.

So he will continue to be sad that he cannot help me with the manual, and I will continue to ignore the thing, unless I have to look up something specific. In the meantime, I am doing just fine with trial and error.

P.S. Saturday night Sam's Club had an irresistable deal on a digital camera with an 18X zoom. My current camera has a 3x, which cannot capture a close up of the alligator in our canal, so we bought the 18X. Another 150 page manual. Arrrgh!!!!

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