Technology Makes Life Easier.........

And if you believe that line, then let me tell you about a bridge in Brooklyn that's for sale at a good price.

Last night I was ready to toss my cell phone out into the trash, along with the garage-door opener, the garage light, and the instruction manual for my car. My husband came home from work as I was losing patience with the cell phone, but he missed the parts about the garage door, the garage light, and the car manual.

With the car...... there are small inside lights at the floor of car, by the two seats. I must have touched the little control that makes those lights stay on and stay bright, but I didn't realize that when I saw the lights on when I got out of the car. I waited a few minutes, thinking they'd go off automatically, but of course they didn't.

Out came the manual.... and off went the garage light. Stupid light. It stays on for a little while when you open or close the garage door, then it goes off. We have a separate light in the garage but it hasn't been working and we never got it fixed because I don't do anything in the garage but keep my car in there, and my husband hardly ever goes in the garage.

So there I was, trying to find the page in the car manual for the little floor lights, and the light kept going off in the garage every few minutes and I kept having to hit the garage-door button to make the light go on again. All of this while Gracie is barking from the inside of the house because she hears the noise from the garage-door opener, and while I'm trying to make sense out of the manual that seems to be written by engineers for engineers.

Finally, finally.... I found the right page in the car manual and was able to translate the instructions into plain English and the floor lights in my car went off. Then I came into the house and noticed that there were two messages on my cell phone. Both from my sister.... so I called her back and told her about the car lights, the garage lights, and that whole story.

After the phone call, I noticed that the "message" symbol was still showing on the screen of my cell phone. Well, I didn't want to leave it there because I had called my sister back and I wanted the screen back to its normal state. Out came that manual, also written by engineers, because I can never remember which buttons to push on the cell phone.

I thought I was following the instructions carefully, but the little message symbol wouldn't go away. Not only wouldn't it go away, but some other little symbols came up onto the screen and they wouldn't go away. It was just about then that my husband came home. I told him about the floor lights of the car, and the garage door opener, and I told him I needed to call in the handyman to fix the center light inside the garage.

In the middle of all of that, I'm still trying to clear the screen of my cell phone, and I even managed to remember to ask my husband how his day went at work. His reply: "Would you like me to fix your cell phone for you?" I snapped the cell phone shut and told him I'd do it myself or die trying, thank you very much.

Well, I'm still alive, and so is the cell phone. And it's a wonder that it is, considering how many times I slammed that little lid shut while I was trying to delete those messages.


This afternoon, I called my Aunt Dolly in NY to say hello and see how she was feeling. She's been having back problems, and her doctor has told her to slow down a little bit. Aunt Dolly will be 94 this year. She lives in a house with seven bedrooms, two bathrooms, a wine celler, two kitchens, three staircases, two driveways, a three-car garage.... and she takes care of it all by herself. Her way of slowing down: she makes a smaller pot of homemade soup, she sits down for a cup of tea in the afternoons, and she cleans just one floor of the house per day (one floor meaning one entire story of the house, not one floor in one room).

As I said.... Aunt Dolly is 94. Know why she's living so long and so well? She doesn't have a cell phone and an automatic garage-door opener. She doesn't own a microwave or a computer. She doesn't even know what a DVD or an iPOD is, and if you told her that "technology makes your life easier," she would tell you that "only good hard honest work makes your life easier."

And my Aunt Dolly would never buy a bridge, no matter what the price.