Williamson: Forever behind the tech curve

I am destined, it seems, to spend my life behind the curve when it comes to technology.

link Betty Williamson

I well remember a conversation with a co-worker in the mid-1980s in the office we shared in suburban Washington, D.C. Her husband was a software engineer. My office-mate came in one morning talking about how her spouse and his partners were communicating using their computers and something they were calling “electronic mail.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You mean, instead of walking down the hall to talk in person, they send each other messages?” Clearly there was no future in that idea.

Sometime later, our executive director (who seemed rich beyond imagination to us 20-somethings who practically paid for the opportunity to live near the nation’s capital) was showing off his latest acquisition: a working telephone installed in his car.

Driving through Rock Creek Park one day, he offered me the opportunity to call my mother in New Mexico. It was amazing. But it was also clearly a gimmick for only the wealthiest in our population. A mobile telephone? Who needed that on a daily basis?

By the end of the 20th century, all of my photographer friends had switched to digital cameras, but I knew they were simply following a fad and I was not about to be swept up in that malarkey. “It will never replace film,” I told them, clutching a strip of 35-mm negatives in my sweaty fist.

When I did break down and buy a digital camera, I was so certain I’d never use it that I didn’t even open the box for six months. Tens of thousands of images later, I’m a fan, of course, and in this year of endless wildflowers, I take my camera and macro lens everywhere I go. My morning walk rarely ends with less than a hundred new images.

I was showing some of my wildflower photos to a friend recently in my ongoing quest to learn names for some I’ve never seen before. (I’m only 53 and our last really good year here was in 1941, you know.) She said, “Did you know there’s an app for smart phones that lets you take a photo of a wildflower and it identifies it for you?”

Seriously? I give up. I’m throwing in my towel.

I wonder if there’s an app for that.

Betty Williamson suspects she’ll never be smart enough for a smart phone (but she’s been wrong before). You may reach her at [email protected]