Don't Turn That Dial

Every day at 7:00 A.M. the alarm clock in my mother's bedroom sounds off, a poorly tuned classical radio station blaring away into her morning. She does not get up, she hasn't in at least five years, when she stopped working. My assumption is that she rolls over and pulls a pillow over her head and continues to sleep, for three to four more hours. She has no idea how to reset the alarm. When she finally wanders downstairs she warms up a cup of coffee in the microwave, the one she has had for 10 years, and will not replace, because it has a dial and the button ones are far too confusing. Her toaster requires her only to turn push down on one lever, nothing more, or she would never have toast to accompany that lukewarm coffee. After numerous complaints about my calling, or lack of, I bought her an answering machine, tired of calling and getting no response. It remained in the box, and still is, I am certain, buried somewhere with all the other electronic wonders that have been gifted to her over the years. Several years ago her brother sent her a television set as the one she was watching was purchased by my father before the Watergate hearings began. The large box sat in the front hall for perhaps four years, an obstacle to climb over when coming in or out of her house, until my sister's kind boyfriend set it up, despite her protests. She hates it. Too big, too confusing, and there is a VCR attached, why on earth would she need that?

This terrifies me.

We have a very high tech, button fronted microwave in our kitchen, although I don't use it often. Our toaster is equally advanced and I rarely find myself at odds with the options available. We don't have an answering machine, voice mail, and I am fully capable of calling to retrieve messages, when necessary, although I rarely do. Don't leave a message if you call, I won't get it, drives my husband bonkers. As does my inability to use the remote, or remotes, we have about 17 of them to control one television set. We recently added to our repertoire, new television, new remote. When walking out of the room, I generally reach over and hit the button on the actual television to turn the thing off which horrifies my husband. There are no less than 8 buttons which, when pushed correctly, will accomplish the exact same thing. Rarely do I push them correctly, recently I heard the neighbor's garage door go up, and down, each time I tried to adjust the volume.

A few years ago I inadvertently set my cell phone to Spanish, every single thing that appeared on the screen was in Spanish. I speak a bit here and there but the intricacies of cell phone directions, those need to be in English, they really do. I worked quite a while on that one myself, finally resorting to the husband, the cell phone genius, and even he was not able to right this wrong. Thankfully a kind soul at work, a native Spanish speaker, was able to get me back to English, after only telling about 42 others. And now it would seem that I have hit a button, or clicked a box or done something to send every blog post I write directly to Facebook. Not all together a bad thing but it was my luck that the first such post to hit the Facebook airwaves was about my new found freedom, which means that my high school drama teacher now knows, should he have read on, that I think my thighs need some reshaping, which they do. Given that I have a high school drama teacher one can safely assume that I am generally alright with putting it all out there, but was this really what I wanted to tell all my friends from grade school?

Jack shakes when I hit the computer, never sure just exactly what I might do. When I accidentally signed up for Facebook, following the step by step direction of a friend who sent me the standard "check me out on Facebook" email, I then, unknowingly, sent out an email to my entire address book, including my father's attorney and the priest who married us, asking them to join me on Facebook. It appears that neither took me up on my offer.

My alarm goes off everyday at 5:45, as per my direction. When we reach the end of the school year and find some civility in waking times, I will shut off the alarm. If for some reason I can't figure that out, then at least I will have the good sense to unplug the thing.