I spend half the week working for an online travel publisher. We aggregate travel deals and offer lots of travel-guide/trip-idea content as well. Think Travelzoo and Lonely Planet in one. This past Thursday, an elderly woman with a thick Spanish accent came into the office wanting to book flights to Paris, as per the deals she’d seen advertised on our website. I hated to say (but did) “Sorry, we don’t do any bookings. We’re not a travel agency; we just post the information about good deals, and then people have to book the travel online themselves.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding comprehension but looking rather deflated. “You can buy only on the internet?”
The poor woman had most likely trekked to 34th and Broadway in pursuit of a romantic Paris getaway for a ridiculously low price that would most likely go up significantly if she ever got to the stage of plugging trip dates into JetBlue, AA and a slew of other providers to which our site directs travel-bargain hunters. My heart went out to her. She went from savvy (I found an amazing deal!) to clueless in about two seconds, and the fall of her face really struck me.
Probably because by nature, I’m not tech oriented. I get how humbling it is to misunderstand something that already makes sense to everyone else. In high school, when the internet was just taking off as a research tool, I stubbornly stuck to scouting out dusty books hidden in the depths of the library, proclaiming myself, only half jokingly, a Luddite. I was the last of my friends to get a cell phone. I survived two years of college without my own computer (yes, I spent loads of time in the computer lab and totally missed out on the joys of Napster). My original AOL screen name does hail back to 1994, but that’s hardly enough to counteract how absurdly long it took me to catch on! I think of myself as part of the halfway generation: Half of us know how to touch-type properly and the other half type fast enough, using 3 or 4 fingers, but according to our own, untrained, methods. (I definitely fall into the latter category; fingers: 4, speed: 50-60 words/min). From here on out, everyone’s going to be a touch typist.
No longer a Luddite, I spend hours a day online (all day at work and then some). I even tried to convince my grandmother (we call her Nonna, grandma in Italian) who is in her seventies and lives in Cape Town to get set up with email. She’s adamantly against it, but is totally on board with texting, so I really can’t complain. I do have several friends who are evidently more persuasive than I and are currently showing their older relatives the basic tricks of email trade.
Growing up with computers, we don’t even think about it, but things that are intuitive to us – the double click, the right click, even how to move a mouse – all have to be learned when someone’s never so much as turned a computer on before. It’s like learning a new language, and I don’t mean code. Url, browser, server, drop-down, desktop, RSS feed, operating system…even blog. I have a friend who refers to each post as a blog. So he’ll say, “I read a few of your blogs the other night, and…”
Back to this post’s opening though, the incident reminded me of booking a flight to Bangkok from Hyderabad, India in October 2007. With no option to purchase the ticket online, I had to make the booking on the phone and then pick up and pay for the ticket in person at the Bangkok Airlines Office in Hyderabad. Once there, they told me they only took cash, so I had to withdraw a very bulky wad of 16,000 rupees (equivalent to about 200 pounds, dispatched as 32 five hundred rupee notes) to pay for the paper ticket. Of course, the closest ATM was in the midst of being replenished by three men, the whole procedure being watched over by another two men (in uniform, carrying guns). As you can imagine, it all took some time.
I really felt for the elderly woman who came to our office in search of a tangible, paper ticket, as I used to go in search of real reference books, but in truth, they’re both on the verge of being (if not already) archaic. Novels are next, by way of the Kindle.
On a side-note, what’s with everyone owning personal BlackBerrys all of a sudden? Once a work-related gadget only, I find that more and more of my friends and acquaintances have ditched their personal cell phones for smart phones (I understood when it was the sparkly new iPhone, but this mobile trend has expanded far beyond). In 2009, UrbanDaddy reports on TV coming to the BlackBerry and Urban Dictionary defines the phrase BlackBerry Prayer. And of course, there’s also been lots of buzz about the BarackBerry.
For now, I’m once again opting to be behind the times, sticking to my not-enabled-for-internet-use ice blue LG Chocolate.
I once knew a girl 