In middle school, I was part of the generation of kids who had introductory computer programming classes mandatory in the curriculum. Everyone had to sit at the IBM computer and learn DOS commands. It was 1989, and we had no idea why we would ever need to do this. Our parents were farmers, mechanics, plumbers and other blue collar workers.

At the same time, we saw our first local farms sold and turned into developments. One summer, school let out and in September, at one farm on my bus route, suddenly 8 kids stood at the end of a road by a field that now had houses all over it. But the real shock was when some of these kids had dads that worked in offices and wore suits and carried briefcases.

My dad went back and forth between an OTR truck driver and a diesel mechanic. Periodically he would buy a truck (twice he bought the same 1965 Kenworth) and when he had driven our family into debt with the cost of massive tires and gasoline, my mom would force him back to work as a diesel mechanic at a local paving company.

In high school, we got ONE computer in the back of the classroom to print the stories for the high school newspaper and literary magazine. Previously, we sent our copy down to the business classes so those students could type it in columns. Whether the business students typed it or we did it on the computer, we cut it out and glued it on blue grids with rubber cement.

By college, we all had email addresses and computer labs and web sites on Geocities.

My college roommate had an IBM computer that ran Windows 95. And after my freshman year, I saved ALL my money, drove two hours and bought a floor display model of a Powerbook 165, which if you do not know, was the first real consumer laptop.

I’ve been a die-hard, fight-to-the-death Mac girl ever since. And if you want to have the Mac vs PC fight, save your breath and remember, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both stole their ideas from Xerox.

My point is, I am not a Luddite.

But I have reached the age– and tomorrow is my birthday– where technology issues can unhinge me. I ate half a bag of flaming hot Cheetos last night because the FaceID on my iPhone 13 suddenly stopped working.

I tried being patient. I tried restarting it. At the behest of The Teenager (who only has one more month of being a teenager) I tried to reset it. That failed. And suddenly I was being asked for the password to my bank account. I was faced (pun intended) with having to TYPE passwords and I, for a moment, wondered if fingerprint ID would work… and then I remembered fingerprint ID went out with FaceID.

I tried again. I could not reset FaceID.

Well, I thought, the sensors that read my face must have died. And then suddenly it worked.

I reset my FaceID. Without the help of a teenager.

It still only works about 50% of the time. But, somehow, I will persevere.