Confessions of an iLoser

When I was in grade six, my teachers convinced me to attend a lunch-hour basketball clinic. Their enthusiastic encouragement (some might call it prodding) was prompted not by any particular skill I had thus far demonstrated, but by my height. Always in the middle of the back row for class pictures, I had already spent the latter part of my elementary career trying to pass off ladies' size 3 garments as pre-tween fare as they were the only clothes with enough length to kept me modest.

(True story: I was sent home in grade five to change because my shorts - the correct size for a child my age and cut appropriately for any other child in grade five - were doing the Daisy Duke thing and Southwood School was simply unprepared for the moral disorder brought about by that much thigh.)

Unfortunately, Southwood's propriety extended only to their dress code and nobody thought ahead to the repercussions of forcing convincing one of the tallest, yet undeniably most uncoordinated, girls in school to attend a basketball clinic. Confused by the lack of doctors, I nonetheless gamefully stood at the foul line and was instructed to perform a lay-up with the ball thrust into my hands.

The results of said clinic dashed any daydreams I might have had of the WNBA. Add a soccer ball to the face during recess on a -25 degree day, jeers whenever I proved that I indeed did throw like a girl when the ball - despite my prayers - actually came to me out in the baseball field, and failing the same swimming lesson level (one up from blowing bubbles) three years in a row and I was pretty much cured of any desire to put on ye olde gym uniform.

(And people wonder why I detest team sports.)

My incapacity when it comes to sports is, I have discovered to my sadness, mirrored by my breathtaking disability when it comes to technology. I'm an ardent reader of manuals, only because without them I am totally lost. I only found the "off" button on my Palm Pilot one year after I'd started using it. When I got a new cell phone (an event completely out-from-under-me-rug-pulling), I looked blankly at the salesperson who offered to transfer over my stored numbers. Who knew you could store numbers? More importantly, who knows how?

The Husband tolerates my disability and tries to make anything in our house with a battery/cord as fail-safe as possible. Nevertheless, he still gets frequent phone calls: "I can't get it to work. I hate this (insert name of demon-spawned-product-of-Microsoft-thingamajig)!"

So it really shouldn't be surprising to me that my iPod has been the cause of a fair amount of embarassment this past week. Remember that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the heroine tries to walk over to non-Greek Prince Charming and is yanked back by her headset still connected to the phone?

It's less funny in real life than one might expect.

Even when the iPod, formerly attached to the headphones now dangling in one's ears, goes crashing to the ground, and one almost falls out of one's chair trying to grab it while simultaneously talking to the never-before-met-coworker who appears behind one and surprises the heck out of me one.

Oddly enough, it's even less funny the second time in three days.

Although I suppose that getting odd looks from people on the bus is my own fault if I insist on listening to (really quite hilarious) audio books on my iPod. Here they think that Led Zeppelin is tickling my funny bone (okay, the Led Zeppelin is a bit of a stretch - I suspect I cut a somewhat less flashy figure - my appearance suggests something more along the lines of Anne Murray), when really it's P.G. Wodehouse causing me to snicker.

The fact that my job involves telling people how to use technology is an irony not lost on me. But I suppose if I can understand it well enough to make it work and describe it, then anyone can. As long as they don't mind my dribbling.