Technology… huh?

Six words I’ve heard a lot these past several days are “No Grandpa, let me show you.” And here I thought that as Baby Boomers we knew more than a four-year-old.

Unspecting Baby Boomers

Julie and I are watching our ‘almost two’ and ‘almost five’-year-old grandkids while their parents take a well-earned vacation. Amongst the walks, playgrounds and library visits, “The Sound of Music” is available “on the blue ray player”. (I never had a blue ray player) Naive me was thinking that a ‘blue ray’ was like a VCR… no problem I told myself.

What the heck is a PS4?

It turns out that the ‘blue ray’ is actually a PS4 machine – a play station four. Whoever invented this darn contraption must have intended it as a torture device for Baby Boomers. First off, there are only two buttons on the box itself. I stared at it in disbelief until one of the grandkids uttered a version of that annoying phrase… “I got it, Grandpa” and magically, the box came to life. Now, how to start it playing the movie…

As I sat there staring at the PS-box, muttering to myself and pushing the non-power button I hear another version of – “That’s not what you do. Here, Grandpa, let me show you…”. With that, the almost-five-year-old picks up something that looks like a cross between a palm sander and a flight control for a spaceship and tells me to “just use the menu’. Like the box, this thing has no labels, just a bunch of ridiculous symbols. Some of the buttons have no labels at all. Another Baby Boomer torture device.

How does she do that?

In seconds, this ‘almost five-year-old’ flew through menus and has skipped ahead to the part that she wanted to watch. When I asked her how she knew to press ‘those buttons’, she gives me a confused look and says, “That’s just what you do, Grandpa.” Defensively, I tell her that I understand technology, but I’ve never used a PS-thing before. In what I swear sounded like a patronizing tone she tells me, “I know. It’s okay, Grandpa”. “No,” I say with a more defensive tone, “I worked with computers for over thirty years… I even wrote database interfaces in C…”. She patted me on the knee and asked if we could just watch the movie now.

I really do understand technology… really. I retired because I could, not because I got too old for the technology. Really.