My Reluctant Tech Journey

Life has changed a lot since I was young. Over the years, I have resisted technology, only to embrace it fully when it was forced upon me. Allow me to provide some examples.

I saw absolutely no use for VCRs until we had one. Suddenly, a whole world of unimagined convenience fell my way. I could watch what I wanted when I wanted. Such freedom.

I resisted having a microwave oven forever, actually, until we bought a house that came with one. I listened carefully to all the dire warnings and took them to heart. My trepidation quickly dissolved when I could cook anything in seconds. Thankfully, I had a more practical attitude about our new appliance than my oldest son. Certain the new, magical machine would perfectly cook whatever was placed inside, he caused a fire in his effort to make toast. It took years for his sister and brother to rat him out.

We only recently became owners of a smart phone. My early experiences as a telephone solicitor spoiled me on phone conversation. Why would we need anything more than a flip phone for emergencies? My husband persisted until he found an incredibly cheap phone and yearly plan that should prove more than sufficient. Although I’m certain I’ll never be joined at the hip to this phone, it has already come in handy on a few occasions—four to be exact. Even I can embrace a bit of this new technology.

Where I couldn’t avoid technology was at work. One of my first jobs was as a policy issue clerk at an insurance company. I typed policies all day long—on a typewriter. They had to be perfect. In fact, if a clerk made a mistake, the whole page went in the trash. I probably owe my typing skills to that very job.

The first place I encountered a computer at work was the Motion Picture Industry Health Plan. There was little anyone could do except fill in the blanks. The computer was pretty rinky-dink. Its green screen reminded me of the tiny Hoffman TV we kept in our living room when I was a girl.

After the Northridge Earthquake, I took a job close to home as a word processor at an insurance company. Typing all day was boring but the convenience of going home to do laundry at lunchtime was, as they say, priceless. Since WordPerfect was at an end, I was selected to participate in an intensive training program for Microsoft Word. First given a pile of books to study, I was sent to Illinois to represent my unit for a one-week marathon of all things Word. On the last day of class, we asked how we were supposed to use our wealth of information to actually do our work. That, we were told, was completely up to us.

Home in Santa Clarita, I waded through my newfound knowledge and came up with seven simple steps that would enable the operators I trained to do their jobs effectively. How does corporate America survive? All it would have taken was one corporate employee to figure this out and they could have saved thousands of dollars.

At any rate, my efforts paid off. I was soon a lead worker who could take virtually any form or letter and duplicate it exactly. I embedded “stop codes” that let word processing operators complete documents with amazing speed and enabled claim representatives to dictate variables in far less time than it would have taken to type their own documents. Having personally made every mistake there was, I could troubleshoot any problem an operator managed to invent. I was soon in charge of pattern letters for the entire state of California.

I learned other Microsoft applications through the years. I taught myself Access to write a program where claim numbers could be dumped. Information about the policyholder, claim, address and phone number then populated various reports. It was a challenge that took months. I was delighted when my streamlined and accurate program replaced an old, inept one.

Working with PowerPoint presentations helped me master that application. Trouble-shooting an Excel spreadsheet soon enabled me to not only make corrections unaided but prepared me to make my own spreadsheets and reports.

I occasionally received financial reward or acknowledgement for these extracurricular activities. Usually, they merely provided relief from boredom. But I’ve come to realize, they served another purpose. My knowledge of Microsoft Office and my willingness to embrace that technology is what made my dream of self-publishing an attainable goal. I’ve even been playing around with using PowerPoint to make book covers. I guess technology is not such a bad thing, after all.