Technopause

Always on the cusp, after buying my first computer, a 4-megahertz "screamer," I read the entire DOS book. My MHz were eventually replaced by GHz, a thousand times faster. Over the years I kept up with Moore's law.

As I raised my children, along with First Communions, ACTs, dioramas, social responsibilities, the golden rule, and selecting high schools, I made sure they were computer literate. I was their IT department. It was a shared, joyful journey.

Meanwhile, GUIs went from 4-colors to millions; keystrokes became point-and-click; HTML, drag-and-drop. Moore's law approached an asymptope, its slope eventually becoming slippery.

I fell off the learning curve and landed on an ass of Luddite.

Last week my children came to visit, along with their own children. It was wonderful family time, but that's not entirely correct: what it was, really, was my chance to consult with my IT department:

• Netflix wouldn't stop buffering.
• Nest notifications no longer appeared on my watch.
• My Google Mesh was conflicting with my Verizon network.
• Ever since upgrading to Mojave, or Kemosabe, or whatever the hell it was, my iTunes library has been misplaced.

This was not the complete list.

I realized I was going through technopause, as much a rite of passage as colonoscopy and osteoporosis. And while I didn't have hot flashes, I did have full caches. And irritibility and mood swings. My cloud was raining on me.

But my IT Department came through. It turned out it was wonderful family time, technopause be damned!