Technology : Not just a good idea!

I'm trying to keep up, really, I am. All technology, all electronic, 24/7. I'm fortunate I have a daughter who understands these things, and friends who take the time to help me create a site like this (thanks, Johanna!, thanks, Kate!)

The thing is, I thought I was in the know, back in the 80's, when I was in the office setting and the work we did required computers. I worked for a company called Tele-Log, which later changed to TV Data. We published television listings for newspapers, shopper guides, cable companies... and used a computer service called Graphic Data. This was in Atlanta, GA, where the mainframe took up an entire office, and was linked to terminals in our office. Which meant we both had to be in the same building, at least at first. Each tv program had its own code, which had to be typed into the right time slot. It was detail oriented, and fun to talk to tv stations all across the county to find out the latest changes in their schedules...

And then we got a computer for things like: writing letters, doing spreadsheets. The only company around was Xerox, and when the computer came on it was all DOS. Remember DOS? And the floppy disks were, well, floppy. We had to be careful when we put it in the disk drive so the information would not be corrupted. And it was sooo cooool. We could type and see an error and not have to use white out, and not have to get the type to go just right without looking too sloppy with the IBM type balls. You may remember, having to scrunch letters together into a small space when you found an error?

And then there was the Commodore. We had one at home, a home computer! The text didn't wrap around, but hey, we had a Star Trek interactive game that worked on the Commodore!

When we moved to North Carolina I worked at the Asheville Police Department, transcribing Detective reports for their files. At first this was done on.... an IBM typewriter. Then they sent me to a class at City Hall where we learned Word! (and solitaire!) And that just opened everything up.

After seven years, I became a massage therapist, and was no longer in an office setting. I didn't realize at first, but the technology kept changing! And I was getting farther and farther behind the curve. I wasn't keeping up. It was little things at first: my daughter had to program the tv, she knew which cables went where. And then it was setting up the new computer. Accessing the internet, websites... and I started teaching massage at AB Tech.

So now I'm catching up. I'm told that the internet is not the future of marketing, it's the present of marketing, having a presence with marketing. So I have to learn how to drive the big car, or get out of the road. I'm learning to drive. (Not to be confused with driver, which I understand is part of a computer...) I just hope I can figure out all the signals without getting into a head-on collision on this information highway!