One of Us

When I was in kindergarten, before I really learned how to write a "p" with a pencil (I've always had trouble with 'p', I don't know why) I and my classmates were lined up boy/girl and trotted off to the computer lab where Mavis Beacon and the "alphabet alien" taught us how to type. This was back in the day when floppy disks really flopped and your choice of font color was orange or green. Later, in the third grade I, along with four other students who happened to be chosen as the "gifted and talented", were sat in front of the first five Macintosh's ever to live in an elementary school in Maui, Hawaii. There the "alphabet alien" turned into the "mouse alien" and we learned how to point AND click. I've been pointing and clicking ever since.

What I'm getting at here is computers have been an important part of day to day life for me since I was five. That's almost twenty years ago. I learned to type my name before I learned to write my name. Shoot, I learned to type before I learned to read. A computer, to me, is not some newfangled toy. Not some novelty that has come in to replace my calculator. It's is THE tool. If you really want to get along in the western world, you're gonna have to start using it. And using it a lot.

Which is why it annoys me that out of the 20 people in my department I'm considered the only "computer person". The term is thrown around with equal parts awe and disgust. As if it's a betrayal for me to know how to create a spreadsheet, and my pointing and clicking skills make me dangerous. I'm the new species, I'm the computer-kind.

Likewise, it's become common to hear people beg off tasks by saying "I can't do that - I'm not a "computer person". Again in the same tone as someone saying "I'm not one of those people. I would argue that I too am not one of those people. I'm not a "computer person". I happen to be a regular person. My brain is made of mushy stuff, not processors and chips. My bones are covered in skin, not cheaply produced plastic. And you certainly won't find a sticker anywhere on my body that says "Intel Inside". I am in fact a person who uses computers, just like the other 19 people in my department do.

I could accept the fact that some people have been doing this work for longer than 20 years. I can accept that at some point in the past the work I do now was done with pens and papers and adding machines. I know adapting to moving a mouse around in a virtual picture can take a little getting used too. My mother still has trouble looking at the screen instead of the mouse when she's "pointing and clicking". But I cannot accept that a person who uses a computer for various projects 9-10 hours a day five days a week cannot actually do computer "things". They use the computer - they are computer people. They live in the computer age.

And it's time to act like it. If you can turn on a computer, open a program and type in a command - you my friend use a computer. If you can input random data and use the computer to produce information from it - you are part of the Information Processing Cycle. If you can navigate your web browser towards some chicks random web journal - you my friend are a computer person.

You are, in fact, one of us.