5 Times I Knew Too Much About Technology

I grew up on a computer. We'd play the lifesaver mini golf games after school, compete at typer shark during school and were given calculators by the time we hit middle school math. All this computer advancement makes anything less than advanced technology difficult to deal with. Here's five times within the last year alone I was too computer savvy for every day life:

1. You want me to fax this?

When I was working in a very small digital marketing firm, I was asked to fax a document to a court. The task involved downloading an attachment from an email, printing it out and then basically sticking it back into the printer to fax it. What in the world? Why can't I just forward the email instead of these seven steps that lead to an excessively similar end? It got even more annoying when the phone kept beeping incessantly because the line was busy. All in all, it took me about a half an hour to send a piece of paper semi-electronically via a fax. I can see why we progressed passed this.

2.Why are scanners so hard?

I was trying to send someone a receipt so I could get reimbursed. I decided to wait until the next day so I could scan it in at work, then email it. Why are there so many buttons on a scanner!? I bet half of them don't do anything of value anyways. After about ten tries, I gave up and decided to just snap a quick picture of it with my camera phone, attach it in an email and then send it on its merry way. Plus one for faster and more efficient methods.

3. Why are you sending me so many pieces of paper?

For as long as I can remember, good old Bank of America has been sending me my monthly statements via email. They sometimes send me some print paper, but I think that's my annual statement. But when I bought some shares in the stock market, I got a new piece of paper mailed to me every day for what felt like a month. Do they actually expect me to read all this? On top of that, by the time the paper copies even made it to me, I had already went online and did everything I needed to do. I also couldn't even find a spot to tell them I like electronic things better than paper things. Save some trees, and save me some paper cuts. Just email them to me, and I may actually read them.

4. I have to talk to someone about this?

When my mom and dad gifted me my dad's car, they also gifted me with the burden of full car ownership. That meant getting some car insurance of my very own. Like I even know where to start with that. I actually think I had so little of a concept of how to handle it, my mom took pity on my soul. She went from site to site comparing prices, only to decide that I should stick with their carrier. She even went through the lengths to set up the phone call for me to start up my own account. Yes, I am weak. But I also couldn't fathom why this merited a phone call. I got my credit card without having to speak to a soul. That's my idea of customer service.

5. Is there a reason you keep using the 'reply all' button?

Bless her heart (my all time favorite saying I've picked up on since moving South), a woman at work would 'reply all' to every email she ever got. Even those informational ones, where no response is required or desired. And not only would she 'reply all,' she would 'reply all' to every email in an email chain as she was reading it, rather than read the whole email chain and then make one collected statement. I could not comprehend how she didn't know normal email etiquette. It sort of bother other people, but I downright set my mind up about this lady based solely off her inability to grasp emails.

Growing up in the technology boom definitely makes adapting to real life challenging at times.