A "laptop" sounds like such an innocent thing

My new laptop has aged me by about 20 years.

Maybe not literally, but when I try to use it, I feel like a grandma getting her first look at one of them newfangled telephone machines.

I'm always having to call over my kids and ask, "Now what's this here thang do?" "Wait, what was that you did?" "Hey, uh, where'd that thing I wrote go? It just disappeared!!"

I sound just like this 50-ish woman who was a grad student at Memphis State when I was in my, ahem, fifth year of college there (after my parents had given me three years to figure it out at UT). We were in a brand new class called Electronic Publishing, and Professor Art Terry was showing us a Mac with - gasp! - a program called Windows. We all sat agog as he showed us the mouse and used it to click on the drop-down menus. We couldn't wait to get out fingers on it, and at first the cursors flew wildly around the screens as if we were trying to steer a car with our elbows.

Most of us, when we didn't catch onto something right away, were too cool to say anything. Not Miss 50, though. She'd panic at the slightest blink on the screen and yell out stuff similar to what I posted above.

Of course, now I am closer to 50 than I am to 20, and I sometimes find myself sitting slack-jawed in front of this-here new computer.

For one thing, it has a shiny new version of Word, rather than the B.C. version I had been using. That's awesome, except that the icons are all in the wrong place, and I have to stop and think, "Where is that spell check icon? On my OLD computer, it was always right here where I could find it."

The worst thing you can do to an impatient person is make them have to stop and think about how to do something.

The laptop keyboard is my biggest nemesis right now. The delete button is in the wrong spot, "page up" and "page down" are switched, and "control" is right where my hand wants to reach to hit "shift." Instead of capitalizing something, I end up hitting Ctrl + T and opening a new tab or something equally jarring when I'm trying to be brilliant.

Don't even get me started on the touchpad.

My husband keeps telling me I could get a laptop keyboard, but that would not work very well when I'm using it in my Mister Chair.

To top it all off, I think this screen is telling me I need bifocals.