Electronic Devices

A month or so ago, as my wife and I traveled up to Boston on an express train, we noticed the extent to which the young people sitting near us were immersed in their electronic devices – i-phones, laptops, e-readers, i-pods, and i-pads – typing, texting, reading, listening. Sometimes, it seemed, they were doing several of these at once. Deftly, swiftly, and with complete nonchalance, they operated these devices as if they had emerged with them from the womb.

Not so with me. The older I get the more resistant I’ve become to adding yet another electronic device to my repertoire. It’s not just a matter of age. Some of my elderly friends are as tech savvy as the youngsters, and they operate their devices with the same élan. But as for me, I’ve found that each new device complicates my life and exposes me to one more set of technical problems, many of which I’m unable to solve by myself.

But technical problems are not the exclusive domain of new-fangled electronic devices. They’re found in even plain vanilla instruments such as the telephone. My wife and I spent many hours over a three-day period last week talking to representatives from Verizon, the company that provides our telephone service. The trouble began before that, although we didn't know it at the time, when we placed an order with Verizon. We asked them to change the date at which they would transfer our telephone service from our present address to a new, temporary one. Verizon assured us, when we inquired at the time we placed the order, that the original date had been canceled and replaced by the new one. It turns out that Verizon did change the date for connecting the phone to the new address but it did not change the date for disconnecting it from the old one. So last week, while still at our old address, we were unable to receive incoming calls.

To reinstate our service, we engaged in at least 10 time-consuming conversations with Verizon agents. A few times we were cut off in the middle of our interaction and had to begin again. Once I was put on hold for more than one hour (thank goodness for speaker phones, which allow you to continue working while waiting for someone to come on line). Finally, we found a representative who fully understood the problem and provided a solution. From what she told us, it was clear that none of the previous agents had fully grasped the company’s automated system.

As frustrating as was our recent experience with Verizon, it gave me a perverse sense of satisfaction. It’s not just an old person like me who is confounded by technology. The Verizon technicians were confounded too. The automated system which they had to operate had become so complicated that they had not mastered all of its parts. So those young people we saw on the train, with their fancy devices, are just as apt to run into technological walls as I am.

If it’s true, as a wise person once observed, that there’s never been a labor-saving device that saved anybody any time, the same is also true of electronic communications devices, whether telephone, cellphone, i-phone, fax, or computer. One can accomplish more with their help, true, but they also consume inordinate amounts of time, even when they're trouble-free. But few of them are trouble-free. Rare is the electronic device that has not made its owner want to throw it out a window at least once during its life. I hope Verizon's agents finally learn the company's system before it becomes even more complex. In the meantime, I derive comfort from the knowledge that I'm not alone.