Today’s Kids Just Aren’t That Technically Swift

Not long ago, my husband’s work gave him a cell phone. He makes calls on it, and occasionally he answers calls. Very occasionally.

Our youngest, age 9, however, got hold of that sucker, took her picture with it, made it the phone’s home page and titled it “Daddy’s Girl.” We, of course, had no idea how she did that.

Then his supervisor took him aside at work and said that he wasn’t really supposed to download music onto the phone. The supervisor, himself middle aged, was not surprised to hear that the LSH (long-suffering husband) didn’t have a clue about how to download music on the phone and that the 9-year-old would be spoken to.

This is not, however, a column to talk about the brilliance of young children when it comes to technology.

My point is: if she’s so smart, can you explain the following story?

Not long ago, one of the cheap crap phones we buy at Staples once again broke. To tide us over, we plugged in an old AT&T phone from the 1950s that I had picked up at a garage sale. A teenage babysitter, whose parents had banned her from having a cell phone but who figured out how to make calls on an iPod, came over to watch the kids.

We gave her our numbers. She looked at the phone and back at us. She looked at the phone again warily, like we had told her to call us on the caged squirrel. We tried to explain the whole idea of “dialing” the rotary phone. She and our two kids looked at us like we were from Mars

“That’s okay,” she said. “I have my iPod.”

There’s other technology they can’t handle too.

Why is it that kids that are so smart that they can get on the Internet and find the American Girl web site cannot understand that if one uses a typewriter one actually has to hit a “return” button to move down to the next line.

“Weird,” Son said. “Why doesn’t it do that automatically?”

This may be apocryphal, but I heard a story about a New York City teen headed to Princeton who could not read an analog clock. Princeton.

And there’s albums, which today’s kids can’t tell from a Frisbee. Can today’s kids put an album on a turntable and manipulate the needle to go to the third song?

Can they put film in a camera? Use manual focus? Do they know that if they’re trying to transmit a news story during a hurricane, that it’s best to slow down the baud in order to get through? Do they know what baud is?

There’s another way today’s children’s lack of technical prowess comes in handy. We’ve all read the news story about the hapless car thief who stole a vehicle and found (hell’s bells!) that the car had manual transmission. After a few lurches, the youthful thief abandons the car and flees. The smug, middle-aged owner has a pot belly, not much hair and an aching back. But he also still has his car.