Apologies to my readers for not warning you that I was going to take Easter Sunday off of blogging. This was a long-standing decision, but I neglected to tell you about it in my last post. Mea culpa.

Anyhoo…

This past week, the thing I dreaded the most but knew would eventually happen…took place.

My treasured laptop slowed down immensely on Thursday and I shut it down because I could not use it. I only thank God that I wasn’t in the middle of an editing gig when this happened. In fact, it happened only hours after I had finished my last editing gig. So, praise the Lord again.

The next day, I took the ailing laptop to Staples, specifically to their tech repair desk. The young man who took down my information was extremely polite and helpful. While I used the old desktop in our home to do my work, Staples ran a PC tune-up for free! And I got my laptop back the next night, which was last night.

However…I have yet to hook it up and try it.

I am really scared that something will go wrong and that they didn’t fix it correctly, that I lost significant data, et cetera. Chalk this up to my clinical anxiety, but I’m just plain scared.

I always get scared when I get a new piece of technology or when it gets repaired. This past January, I bought an iPhone 13 Mini to replace my ancient iPhone 6. For the first two and a half weeks that I owned it, I was afraid to touch it. What would happen if I did something wrong? And when I bought my laptop in June 2020, same thing. It took me two days to hook it up and use it.

Luddites (the first syllable rhymes with thud, not with rude) resist technology and avoid it. I do not consider myself a luddite. Some people in the past might have thought I was one, because I did not buy my first smartphone (an iPhone 4) until 2015. By that time, the majority of people my age had smartphones. However, this was for economic/financial reasons.

I consider myself more like the Jawa from Star Wars. They, in fact, love technology…but they are clueless about how to use it. I am not “clueless,” but I’m embarrassed about the number of times I’ve had to go to the Verizon store with my iPhone and say, “Do you know how to do this?”

How about you? Are you more of a Jawa or a luddite? Or neither?