Why is Siri Always Yelling at Me?

I’m afraid of technology. I long for the days of typewriters, for the days when you didn’t have to update your computer every ten minutes. When something is wrong with my laptop I don’t know where to start. Some days I pretend I’m Jewish and bury it in a houseplant like an un-kosher fork.

I think often about moving to the bush, of washing my clothes exclusively in my salad spinner and giving on technology entirely. Every time I go into the laundry room the washer beeps at me for seemingly no reason and I find myself running from the room. I have been an adult for nearly a decade and I am still afraid of appliances.

I am at that age where I can still remember getting my first cellphone (part of me now thinks that it’s safer to hand one’s children fireworks rather than smart phones). When I was first introduced to the technology and had no use for this blue flip-phone that my mother insisted would be excellent for me to have in case of an emergency. The design, at the time, had struck me as overly sleek. I think I would’ve taken more kindly to the over-sized brick of a phone that my mother used for years, a boxy thing that if thrown could double as a weapon.

Perhaps I don’t want you to get a hold of me, and certainly not in a timely manner. If you want to talk to me why not just stop by? Whatever happened to interacting in person? Now when I see friends it’s like eons of time have passed before they’ve managed to fit me in for a Thursday evening drink, only to order a glass of juice because they’re suddenly five months pregnant. And I’m just learning now that it’s their second child.

I do still have a cellphone, but there are days when I think to flush the damn thing. Yet I know that I can’t because once I have figured out the basics of a phone I will use it until I find myself balancing it atop skipping ropes to charge it and yelling into the speakerphone during calls (mostly to my father, who is rather deaf to be fair). I will pretend that it’s not so bad that it clicks loudly into car mode several times a night and begins speaking to me. I will ignore the overall stickiness of it after I spill an entire Chi Chi on it and shrug it off when it drops every second call. To acclimatize to something new scares me.

This is probably why my printer is nearly the same age I am. It is a tank, has lived through being packed off into storage several times and has been dropped multiple times (because that is how I deal with technical problems). There is a printer with WiFi in my house, but after the 17th set of updates I gave up on it.

I fantasize most days about Office-Spacing the new printer with a bat out in the yard but I feel that this will officially establish me as a crazy person to the neighbours. I imagine them leaning out their windows as I stand in the grass with computer parts strewn about the yard, loudly lamenting the end of the days of the abacus.