Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Google me an idiot
Google docs. Google log-in. Google maps and search. Google calendar. Google meet. Google, Google, everywhere and I am lost. The only thing that I can do is google topics of interest to me, and that feature I love. However, I seem to have arrived at the age where all other things Google are not readily available to me. Feeling like a troglodyte – a person unacquainted with the affairs of the world – I consistently face the Google challenge at my workplace. I sometimes have to tell clients to use another method to send me stuff I’ve asked for.
Anyone under the age of 45 grew up with Google, that was launched in 1998 by two PhD students at Stanford University. So, for all the youngsters at my workplace, Google is second nature. As a participant in the unionization effort at Legal Services I have an assignment that requires me to access information stored in a Google account. After last night’s meeting, I’m supposed to review the feedback from our mission statement survey. A nice young woman offered to call me after the meeting and help me navigate my way to the required information. She called and explained how to get ahold of what I need. I wrote down her instructions.
Then I spent the next hour following her steps, then following Google’s prompts, and still failing miserably. It occurs to me that if other people are having trouble, they might do exactly what I ended up doing and give up. Maybe that explains why some people feel uninformed about the latest union updates. However, most of the people who work at my place are under 45, so they don’t have an excuse.
Being among the oldest of employees at Legal Services puts me in a different category – I am now an Elder, a Crone, a source of information about the last century. Not that anyone asks me about it, but if they do, I’m ready to educate them as to what it was like to grow up with the technology of paper and pencil and a Royal typewriter. These machines are now in the “vintage” category, which is where I belong. Anyway, a typewriter always had a prominent place in my childhood home, used mostly to send letters from overseas to family back in the States, as we referred to the USA. Letters were typed on to very thin onionskin “airmail” paper.
I remember taking typing in high school. I don’t think it was a requirement to graduate, but I took the class because it didn’t seem too onerous, (That’s the same reason why golf and archery were my choice of sports classes in college.) Besides, I wasn’t a bit interested in learning how to sew anything…
Speaking of being in the vintage category, I still carry a checkbook. While most of my bills are on autopay, there are some that require a paper rectangle with financial information on it. My kids laugh at me because I still use this apparently outdated transactional device. Recently, though, I am in a position of having to collect money to pay for tickets for the 2024 Holiday Brass concert: between Rose and I, we have convinced 54 people that it is worth $27 for a ticket. I was caught by surprise when people offered to pay me with Venmo or Zelle or Apple Pay. These are mostly people of my age bracket, so I’m proud to know people who use the apps that pay hard currency over the air waves.
Back to my Google dilemma. Finally someone sent me the draft that I was trying to access. They sent it to my personal email, so here I came to open it up. But the torture continues. The Google god demands that I follow a set of instructions that leads nowhere – except to frustration and a wee bit of anger. I’m going to have to ask one of the young’uns to help an old sister out again.