Late Adopter

Scene: Our neighbor's kitchen, evening, circa 1978-1979. Our neighbor, Jack K., sits at the kitchen table. He drives our school bus and also runs his own garage. He can fix anything, often using little more than the wrong size screw and a bit of wire. This evening, he's doing his accounts. He adds a long column of numbers using his son's pocket calculator, then writes them down and adds them up by hand, then compares the totals.

When he glances up to find me watching him, Jack gives a sheepish grin, gestures toward the calculator, and observes, "The damn thing's right every time!"

Pocket calculators were new in those days, and at least four times their current size. At first, our school wouldn't let us use them. Apparently this was a rule: Math Must Not Be Enjoyable, or something like that. My schoolmates were glad when the principal gave in on this point. But I was pretty good at mental arithmetic and never met a math test that could scare me, so I didn't need a calculator and didn't get one for years.

I'm a late adopter. I finally bought a portable CD player just before the first MP3 players hit the market, and I still haven't got around to getting an iPod. Hell, I'm still playing music cassettes that I bought in the early '80s. (Most of them still sound pretty good, IMO.) The Internet was six years old before I ventured to surf it.

And now, finally, I'm fed up with Internet Explorer and have begun to experiment -- cautiously -- with Opera. But it'll be weeks before I feel comfortable enough to abandon IE altogether.