Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 25, 1993 TAG: 9302240198
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
GETTING WITH THE PROGRAM ISN'T SO BAD
I have always figured that God gives each person a certain amount of brain space, and that you shouldn't clutter up your God-given space with information you don't absolutely need or want in there.Like how to program the VCR, for instance.
So for years I resisted committing to memory that complicated series of push-buttons it takes to record the "MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" (read: "The Young and the Restless") and "National Geographic" (read: "Home Improvement").
And then the other morning - during ratings week - the power company guys shut off our power to work on a neighborhood line, thus erasing the labyrinth of VCR numbers my husband, a former videographer (read: expert button-masher), had set.
This was just ONE HOUR before the "MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" was to begin - and it was ratings week, which meant that finally Michael was going to take revenge on Cricket for busting him for sexual harassment, and Lauren was going to receive that last piece of the incriminating photo puzzle in the mail, which means she will soon find out that psycho-nurse-from-hell Sheila Carter-Granger-Carter is ALIVE - and this time it's not just a nightmare.
Ratings week is really the only time you should record all five installments of the "MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" because things actually happen that week. Other weeks you can just get by with recording Monday and Friday installments of the "MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" - and still get an accurate view of the world around you, especially the fact that Jack knows that Nicki really dumped Victor and took him back because she was pregnant with Jack's - not Victor's (I think) - child.
Anyway, I was really starting to panic. Until finally I picked up the remote control and figured out, all by myself, how to program the VCR. It wasn't even that hard because the machine tells you, step by step, just what to do - as long as you don't get nervous halfway through and give up, skipping all your daily appointments so you can stay home and watch the "MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" live.
But I mastered that microchip, and it felt good. Kind of like the first day of junior high when you got your very-first locker combination and had to figure out how it worked - once around clockwise, then double back around twice, then clockwise around once again - and it was really no big deal, even though you'd been worried about it for days. What a confidence-builder.
And so I was really getting cocky a few days later when my computer printer at home ran out of paper, and my husband was at work, and I had a paper due at school in one hour. And yes, he had told me a dozen times: "You really need to figure out how to do this yourself." But I hadn't bothered to figure it out - again, the wasted brain-space theory.
But this time I had no choice. I mangled a few dozen sheets of paper, almost cried, mangled some more sheets of paper and said some words I can't repeat here. But eventually I got all the holes aligned, all the right buttons pressed, and it worked. Another byte conquered.
I know it's generational, this techno-phobia. A teen-ager I know of who is failing basic wiring at school figured out how to soup up his Nintendo machine at home by combining parts of a broken one with parts from his own.
By contrast, it took my 65-year-old mother years to figure out the forward, reverse and eject functions on her car cassette player. She listened to the same tape - featuring Japanese elevator music, NO JOKE - for so long that no one would ride in the car with her.
Especially to the automatic-teller machine, where I once watched her try to get $100 out of her checking account for 10 minutes. Until finally she left with a single dollar bill, and hasn't been back since.
I don't know what we were thinking when we bought her an answering machine for Christmas last year. My husband had to set it up for her, record his own voice on the outgoing message, then show her which buttons to press to retrieve her incoming messages.
She was really tickled with herself when she figured it out, though. There's just been one problem: Her retiree friends hate answering machines and refuse to leave her messages.
She was getting really bummed about it until one day she and my step-dad came home from the mall and actually saw the light flashing! Mom ran to the machine, mashed the correct button and giddily watched the machine rewind.
From the mall phone booth my 75-year-old step-dad had snuck into, his voice echoed the Stevie Wonder song: "I Just Called to Say I Love You."
I don't care if she ever gets another message, that machine was $40 bucks well-spent.
So I guess we're never too old to learn new technology - when we really want to anyway. My mom still thinks computers aren't anything more than glorified typewriters and adding machines - and you should be able to do that kind of figuring in your head.
But she did surprise me recently with this revelation: that she has been programming her own VCR for years.
Beth Macy, a rhythm-impaired features department staff writer, recently figured out how to program the Stairmaster at the Y - but then fell off it midway through the work-out. Her column runs on Thursdays.