The Luddite in me/us

Recently, my wife was telling me about how the senior staff at her workplace were quite wary of dealing with electronic equipment, how they'd panic if the printer or the photocopier had a paper-jam, or how they were quite uncomfortable about the prospect of handling a certain task using M$ Office Excel spreadsheet than using tables in M$ Office Word.

Aside:
*Shudder* Tables in Word! Why don't people just strap themselves to an electric chair, and have a sadist pull out each tooth in your mouth with a pair of pliers without anesthesia, while being electrocuted simultaneously? I wager it will be less painful than dealing with the formatting of the tables.

Anyway, coming back to the topic, we got talking about technology and technophobia and one of us (I don't remember which)...

Aside: This is a diplomatic maneuver usually employed by husbands when they aren't sure what stance their wives would take, and don't want to annoy them.

Anyway, back to the topic...
... and one of us (I don't remember which) ended up wondering how we might be considered Luddites when we grow old and cannot keep pace with the technological changes around us.

Does getting older impact ones ability to grok fancy new technology? Or will we be as sharp as we're today with the advent of new technology? Why do people lag behind, assuming that at one point they were up-to-date with the day's latest technical gizmos? Is it because, after a certain stage, we get comfortable with the tools we've because they seem to do all the things we want to do? Or is it because with age, we slowly lose the curiosity and don't want to pursue the latest fad of the day?

At that point, I was feeling mildly confident that no matter what happens I'd definitely stay abreast of the technological advances, and never appear clumsy using the latest technologies. However, a few days ago, I'd to use text-messaging on my cellphone/mobile/or-what-you-will and I realized that I might be wrong.

I dislike text-messaging, partially because I feel it is clumsy having to type out the letters using the numerical pad. Of course, i cud ve rittn smth lik this, but I'm over that phase. I like to feel smug after having typed out the text in proper English. And typing out words properly using the normal text entry mode is painful. Hip people would point out that I should be using T9/iTap for text entry. I tried it once when I first got my cellphone, couldn't figure it out and so never tried text messaging ever since.

However, a few days ago, I went back to it and it seemed so straightforward and simple that I feel quite stupid to have avoided it for all these years. I must say it is quite nifty! I guess the words I was trying to type weren't too complicated, and so it was easy for the algorithm to guess at the words I was trying to type.

So I'm mildly consoled by the fact that even though I gave up T9/iTap a few years ago, I was able to learn it a few days ago. I guess to fully get rid of the stupid feeling, I probably must learn Morse code, type my text-messages in Morse, and figure out a way to have them automagically be translated into English text before it is sent out. Well, what can I say... I belong to the weird group of people who think like this.

P.S. Just to annoy my wife-y: ये मेरा दिल यार का दीवाना| ;)