The training wheels come off

WEEK 41

This week’s “first” lacks the charm of dogsledding and the drama of biking Manhattan. It is, however, noteworthy for its astonishing truth: at the age of 52 years and 41 weeks, I am buying my first computer.

The backstory is equally fantastic. I’m getting ready to leave the company where I’ve been employed every day since 1991. During those 28 years, my career advanced right alongside the advancement of computers in business. And working for a global company with technology at its core, all I had to do was show up, for my entire adult life, and be coddled by really good corporate IT.

My memory of how we got work done in the early days is foggy. Yes, we used desktop PCs. And e-mail. And fax machines. And shipped discs by overnight mail with files that needed to be shared. One day, as the years went on, they handed me a laptop. And a modem. Then WiFi. Then a smart phone.

They did this, of course, so I could work all the time, at which time I had no time to set up my own personal system at home. Nor did I want to. I lack curiosity for technology. I’m a non-adopter if there is such a thing. I even wrote an unfinished essay called I hate my iPad.

Alas, here I sit, in March of 2020, just a couple of weeks away from having to hand over my corporate-owned – and only – laptop, which after 28 years is filled with thousands of files and old e-mails. Breaking away from the global mothership to not only buy — but also set up — a new computer has been so daunting that I’ve had to will myself to focus on micro steps so as not to hyperventilate and pass out.

Step one, of course, in any important life purchase is to phone a friend. Lucky for me, she lives in the same apartment. My wife knows her technology from decades in tech-centric companies plus writing software and audio algorithms and wiring keyboards and programming electronic music and just being super smart.

I know enough to know that we need to start with the hardware, and she asks me a few questions about the kind of laptop I want. I surprise myself by blurting out several requirements: Touch screen. 2 in 1 notebook design (essentially a 360-hinge to become a tablet). Comfy keyboard (as a writer, this is my axe after all). Svelte and not too corporate looking. Windows (for all of you Mac purists out there, just hush-up).

Together, we winnow down the choices and do a couple of field trips to local stores to test the specimens in the wild. I bang on a few keyboards and marvel at the sharp displays. I learn about U processors (good for productivity and everyday performance) and G processors (better for graphics). I hold the chosen models in my hands and picture myself side-by-side with all the other unemployed writers in a cute café.

I’ll jump right to the conclusion. I’m sitting in front of my new machine, the 13.3-inch HP Spectre x360. The buy was swift. The set-up, mostly dummy proof. Cortana, the lovely Windows virtual agent held one of my hands through a friendly, on-screen pep talk as we walked through the basics. Thank goodness my equally lovely in-house IT expert held my other hand as we got stuff off the machine I wouldn’t need and deleted what turned out to be insidious pre-installed programs. How do mere mortals navigate this stuff?

Each day since, I’ve been proudly configuring my new instrument. I got Office and key apps downloaded and running without incident. I even succeeded at my own cloud-based file transfer from my work machine. This morning, I read the New York Times online in tablet mode.

It’s a lovely little machine. And though I’ve got more to configure (it’s not going to back itself up), I feel a tiny bit more grown up and ready to venture out on my own.