Are We There Yet?
Google Earth doesn't know they exist
LORI CLINCH
There are those in the world who are electronically in-tune. They are brilliant, they are skilled and the largest lot of them are under the age of 15.

I have one child who communicates to his people via text messages. Another child who lives with his iPod, and just last week Little Charlie scoffed at me as I pulled the checkerboard from the cupboard and said, "Nobody plays with real checkers anymore."

Ain't that a megabyte?

Yet, I am not discouraged. I don't have any friends on Facebook, and I can't convert an 86-syllable message down to nine letters and two symbols, but I do have buttons about my abode and am not afraid to use them.

I program my own remotes, am in charge of the digital clocks and unlike some of my counterparts, I can run the answering machine with ease.

Although I know that a hard drive is more than a ride home from school with the kids, it's the computer that stumps me. For here, before me, is a machine that holds all of my thoughts, finances and links to decorating Web sites.

I use it to do my writing, communicating and to keep in touch with a cousin in Pocatello whom I have never met. I treat it nicely, give it a good home in a climatecontrolled corner and do my best to keep its vestibules dust free.

It thanks me by acting like a 2-year-old. That's right. This brain machine, this data monger, this big thinker is just about enough to drive a woman to drink.

And using its hard drive, no less.

Take yesterday, for instance. I had a boatload of paperwork and a plethora of tasks to complete and rather than rise to the occasion, I'll be danged if the computer didn't go all sluggish on me.

Rather than bounce from screen to screen in the manner to which I've grown accustomed to, this stinking computer sat there and had the audacity to tell me that my program wasn't responding.

Who, I ask you, gets the choice not to respond?

Being a person who knows how to run buttons, I did as any techno-guru would suggest and attempted to restart the dang thing. Since the computer was still thinking about the other things that I'd asked it to do and hadn't yet decided if it should respond, the "restarting" process took upward of 15 minutes.

It was long enough to fold a load of towels and dust other nooks and crannies about the abode. But, oh no, not me. For reasons we may never understand, I sat at the desk and stared at this machine and remained a captive audience while it simply turned itself off and back on again. Once we were back up and running, opened my accounting program and once again tried to pay the bills.

I entered a number of payments and as I was about to hit submit, the computer freaked out, the Internet went down and chose to deal with the mess by leaving the office and going off to fold those stinking towels.

My life is nothing if not fulfilling.

Just then my husband, whom I love deeply, appeared in the kitchen with a look of frustration and a phone attached to his ear. He put a hand over the mouthpiece and said, "Can you finish this call for me? I got to run."

I don't know what made me take that call. Call it instinct, call it ignorance, call it a cultured reaction that is similar to someone asking you to hold their chewing gum. Either way, I took the phone and instantly regretted it when I heard typing in the background.

"Can you tell me again where you live?" the man asked on the other end.

I gave him the directions to get to our home in three sentences or less, but he stopped me short. "That won't help me; need to find you on Google Earth." "Well, if we're not on Google Earth, can tell you the actual directions to get to our house."

"Are you near Lake Haves?" "Well, no."

"Mukwonago, Wisconsin?"

"No," I responded as I felt the frustration mount. "I'd suggest that you do as did and step away from the computer. Life's too short to be held captive by a machine that won't cooperate."

"If I don't find you on Google Earth then we can't make our delivery."

"Life was easier before we were tethered to computers," I said in frustration.

"Yes, it was," he responded in frustration. "How far are you from the Appalachian Mountains?"

"Far enough that it'd take a hard drive to get us there."

Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book "Are We There Yet?" You can reach her at www.loriclinch. com.