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When I was a younger man, I’d often view older people with a mixture of exasperation and amusement as they would try to figure out a function on some piece of consumer technology that they owned. They would stare at the buttons for a while in complete confusion until they would give up and hand it to me. I would look at the object, quickly scan the buttons and immediately intuitively grasp the sequence of buttons that needed to be pushed to achieve the desired effect.
So you can imagine my surprise when in the past few months, I found myself having trouble working simple things like Zoe’s digital camera. After staring blankly at the buttons for a while, a weird feeling of disorientation came over me and my eyes slowly started to glaze and none of the symbols next to the buttons made any sense to me whatsoever. “Augh, I’m turning into an old guy!!” I shrieked. Man. Soon I’m going to be the one handing over that piece of new-fangled electronica in resignation to someone younger and more adept. I can just hear it now… “See, Moon, this is how you do it… just press this big green button here.” I knew I was in trouble last night, when I picked up the remote control to my stereo and I had a few seconds where I was completely drawing a blank on how to even turn the damn thing on.
Good grief.