It is a great myth of childhood that adults understand everything, or if not everything, then at least math, and if not math, then the news. Maybe somewhere this mythical adult really does exist; I for one cannot believe how often I operate, and in how many capacities, without a clue.
Some of this I blame on the internet, or if not the internet, then technology. (I don’t really know the difference.) Crystallized in my memory is the very first time I ever got online. It was the ’90s, it was dial-up, and I had an AOL account. There was the sound of dialing, and then a long buzzy tone. At last the web answered, and like magic, I latched onto the teat of the world.
It was cool at first. I had one email address, and so did the three other people I knew online. We wrote each other daily, often saying things like, “Isn’t this cool? We’re online!” We’d italicize “online.”
And then everything fell apart. Suddenly I had four friends online, which was overwhelming enough, but then came spam, and then viruses, and then, perhaps worse than viruses, virus protection, which I never really knew if I had or not. As if spam and immunity weren’t enough to worry about, along came Facebook with its own set of incomprehensible algorithms, though I didn’t join right away because I was already drowning in a sea of confusion about a number of things, not the least of which was math and news.
And then, like a ghost ship in the night, smartphones suddenly loomed, along with a personal assistant named Siri, with whom I had a fight just last week. I was asking her questions, and she was answering them with varying levels of accuracy, which was fine as I’m not a stickler for facts; the problem was that, prior to each answer, she would say my name. (If I were emailing this to you, I would put, “say my name” in italics, to demonstrate my level of annoyance.)