I've come to the conclusion that the Long Suffering Husband is a technophobe. It didn't take much detective work on my part. It's pretty obvious that he's unable, or unwilling, to work anything that has more buttons than your average remote control (which, funnily enough, I have a problem working).
He still has an old-style flip phone, which I hate, because texting on it is tedious. Even Sainted Child has a smartphone. (The Little Professor doesn't have one yet, although he desires one mightily, mostly for the games he can play on it, I suspect.)
Of course, he hates my touch-screen phone just as much. He can't use it - or, probably more accurately, he won't even try - he just gets the kids to dial for him. And he has no patience whatsoever with any of the other functions, although he'll use the mapping/GPS, but only if someone else with work it and translate for him.
As for social media applications, forget it. I begged him to get a Facebook account, but nothing doing.
"You don't have to use it, I just want you to have one so I can say I'm married to you," I told him. I mean, surely, he didn't mind my telling everyone we were married. It's been more than a decade now.
"Doesn't it already say you're married?"
"Well, yes, but if you had an account, I could say I'm married to you, specifically."
"Doesn't everyone you're friends with know we're married?"
"Well, yes, but - "
"What's the point of telling everyone something they already know?"
You see? Hopeless. He has no interest in "re-connecting" with relatives or classmates he's fallen out of touch with - "If I wanted to talk to them, I would just call them" - or in "telling everyone everything I'm doing and everywhere I am; it's not that interesting, anyway."
I tried coaxing him to Twitter, telling him he could follow sports beat writers and it was a good place to get breaking news. Several athletes crashing and burning in quick succession by tweeting something controversial sank that boat before it even left the harbor.
"Besides, I can get the sports news from newspapers and ESPN," he told me. "All Twitter is are links to sites I already go to."
So, when he recently started having trouble with reception on his rotary-dial flip phone, he started looking for another low-tech phone. Too bad it's almost impossible to find one anymore.
"I can't believe this," he complained. "I don't want all this stuff. I just want a phone. It's supposed to be a phone, you're supposed to talk on it. What would I do with all this stuff?"
"Come to the dark side, we have video-streaming," I told him.
You would think he'd appreciate an old-school movie reference, but he was not amused.
(Wallace-Minger, The Weirton Daily Times community editor, is a Weirton resident and can be contacted at swallace@pafocus.com)
