I met my friend Jeni for lunch in Indianapolis last week.  Jeni and I have been friends since first grade, going all the way through graduation from Mt. Vernon High School and freshman year at Purdue.  Jeni is one of those people who remembers everything.  She can tell you who was dating whom in high school, remember specific events, and she saves everything.  She had been going through old shoe boxes of mementos and came across some notes, cards, and letters I’d written to her over the years.  We laughed about a lot of them over lunch, but what really ticked me was a typed letter I’d sent her.  I’d been typing in the computer lab at ISU, waiting on a friend to finish a paper.  This was in the early days of changes in technology, while I was still typing my research papers on a Brother word processor, intimidated by the computer lab, maybe around 1994.

“I need to find out how to use e-mail so I can write to Paula on campus.  I can type a letter from here to her computer and she’ll get it in a day.  Find out if you could get e-mail, too.  Then I could write to you, too.”

This makes me laugh because I have two identities which I will divulge to you now.  Around here with the people I live, work, play, worship with, I’m the world’s biggest idiot about computers and technology.  I’ve been known to refer to a thumb drive as “a plastic thingy you put in the side of the computer”.  My reputation with my friends here is that I’m at the tail end of the learning curve, scrambling to keep up and failing with gusto.

Jeni, on the other hand, told me a couple of months ago that I’m “cutting edge”.  Driving a hybrid, blogging, etc.  I told her about my local reputation for stupidity, and she couldn’t believe that to be true.  I love Jeni for many reasons, and her ability to puff me up is certainly one of them.  And because I love her so, I hate to burst her bubble with the truth about my technological savvy.  Still, I’ve come a long way from my abovementioned description of this mysterious phenomenon called “e-mail”.