Sometimes I'm just not paying attention. When the electric alarm clock came on the market, I learned how to set it without too much trouble, and remembered to make it a.m. or p.m. The first time I used a pop machine that made change, I thought that was amazing. When I worked as a secretry, I learned how to use the dictaphone, and the electric typewriter. Using the microwave was a bit of a challenge, but went allright after I learned to not put eggs with shells still on them in it.

During the last presidential election I used modernized voting equipment. At the airport I dealt with some kind of screen to check myself in for flight.

I still ignore self serve checkout aisles at supermarkets, but it's not from fear of using them. I just feel it's not right to replace hardworking store clerks with machines. The same thing goes for using a computer to check on mail and package deliveries.

I realize I'm in the minority about this. My son and a daughter got airline tickets for me on the p.c. When I was called up for jury duty, one son showed me how I could find out if I even needed to report for duty, by checking it on the computer.

I remember being so frightened when I went to the college to register for classes, and those monster looking machines silently waited for me to be brave enough to deal with them. Nowadays, students grades and school records are at parents' fingertips, on the keyboard.

I do understand we've been living in a cyber space world a long, long time, and didn't complain when I learned it was possible to email a soldier grandson in faraway Iraq. I never did learn how to do Instant messaging, though.

A year or so ago I decided I would learn how to use a computer, and I've made some progress, but lately am almost overwhelmed. I've been doing nursing almost 25 years. The paper work it requires ranks right up there with about as much as monks in monasteries do.

I'm trying to hold on to a good attitude about this historical change, but when I deal with laptops on my medicine cart, and compete with other nurses for better places to plug the laptop into, so it doesn't just get started, and then crash, I so wish I didn't have to learn this new system.

I understand the advantages of recording and transmitting information on computers. I admit I've complained about the pen and paper method, for years. The cybernetics part of all this is not just my thoughts on it, but my frazzled feelings.

I know I must get good at using the program in those silly looking laptops, and somehow, I will. But what I want to do is find a nice little nursing home in some remote village that still does nurses' charting the old fashioned way.

Often we had to work over to complete it, but at least could sit down and rest our backs, while charting.