Love at First Sight: The iPhone

Okay. I have fallen in love with the iPhone.

Please understand, I have very few technical skills.

I rely on my wife to take care of my computer, to update whatever needs updating, to do back ups, and to fix it when it’s broken. She set up my blog site so I would only have to click on a couple buttons to upload pictures or enter text.

I must admit to having worked in the computer software industry for about six years. I did QA testing and wrote technical manuals. I left when I gave birth to Ben and ever since? It was as if all the technical skills I had left with the breast milk. I know there was at time when I could navigate in DOS, edit autoexec files, install software AND hardware.

No more. I use a Mac and anything I used to know about PC’s is so outdated it doesn’t matter. Kind of like being able to milk a cow by hand- sweet but not anything useful in today’s world.

My wife, on the other hand, is a technology freak. When we first started living together a million years ago, she was attending Berklee College of Music. There were pieces of equipment she simply had to have.

Everyone has one, she said.

What did I know? I went to a liberal arts school and studied psychology. Big equipment was a Skinner box and a rat for the learning lab- the school provided both. She was studying music production and engineering. Sounded very technical to me. Out of our fairly meager budget at the time, sound modules were bought, along with a MIDI capable keyboard.

Had to have it. Everyone did.

I believed her until I met one of her fellow students who said, OH MY GOD, Jeanine has the BEST set up on campus!

Caught.

Still, over the years, I have come to accept- mostly- Jeanine’s love of gear and technology. New technology. She has gone from being a student at Berklee, to being a professor there and a highly sought after advisor all across the world about all things in musical technology. Not bad for a woman in a predominately male business.

Still, I do roll my eyes when the latest shipment of something comes to the door. Which is often. Her latest? The iPhone. As a Mac devotee, of course she had to have the iPhone. Everyone does.

No, that line does not work on me anymore.

Yesterday, she let me play with her iPhone.

I fell in love with it.

So cool. No buttons, just controlled by your fingertips. Not so tiny you can’t see the text. Ooo. It’s fun.

I could check my email, surf the next all from a little phone. With amazing graphics, I need to add.

I want one.

And then I remembered something a friend said to me the other day. Every weekend, she spends at her second home with her husband; there is no Internet connection. No cable TV.

I’d never see him otherwise, she said.

Maybe? Considering what a mess my marriage is in? All that constant connection is part of the problem. We start off our mornings with our laptop computers and cups of coffee. I go through email and newspapers- I still get two actual papers sent to my house but it’s so much easier to sit with it online.

Years ago, we’d both sit first thing in the morning with the paper and read it together. She’d grab living arts; I’d grab the local section. We’d fight over the sports page.

We don’t do that anymore.

On one hand, both of us have work that requires a great deal of computer time. On the other, what are we teaching our kids? We sit and wonder, over and over, in therapy how we got so far away from each other. I know technology isn’t the only thing to blame- it’s an easy target for a far more complicated problem.

But for now? I’m going to hold off on the iPhone.