I suffer from technophobia

Everytime I have to do something new with technology, I am in fear. Most often it is routine task like changing a password. For last several days, I have been getting mail suggesting that my password is about to expire and I should change it. I am panic striken! Everything is working fine on my computer and so I don't want to change my password.

I am afraid that if I change my password, some software will fail. If I change my password, I may not be able to login to corporate network when I get internet connection at home. Or because I am changing my password from my office computer, my laptop at home won't be able to connect to my corporate network. Or I will not be able to login to network because I am changing my email password and since we have common password for email and network login, I will not know whether I should use the old or the new password for logging into the network. If the network password is changed automatically on changing the email password, then the network password cached on my laptop at home will be different from my most recent network password. So I may face problems when I try to connect to corporate network from home. Or the worst of all, I may not be able to login to my laptop at all! :-O I hate password expiry policies!!

I remember my dialogue with Ramna few years back. The company had shifted to newer version of VPN software and had asked all users to upgrade to the latest version. Ramna asked me whether I had upgraded. I said that I didn't upgrade because the older version is working fine for me. He said, "Let me do it for you", and despite my protests he began uninstalling the older version from my laptop. I sat there in mortal fear!! "I NEVER uninstall a software that is working fine", I said. The new version worked fine. But my fear with technical tasks like software installations and password changes remains.

On my desk, I have a phone with 41 buttons!! I don't know why we need more than ten or twelve buttons. Three times in last two days my phone dialed a number that I did not ask it to dial. Today I was toying with some of the buttons when suddenly the speaker phone got switched on and someone screamed "hello!". I hastily scrambled and pressed a few more buttons at random, and thankfully that shut it off! Oh God! What a narrow escape!! I hate this hi-tech phone. :-(

Sometimes some of my friends ask me why I am still using the cell phone that old and outdated. They show me their hi-tech phones that can do magic. Well, they will not understand. All I need is a phone that has ten digits and a button to dial numbers and receive calls. That's almost all that I do with my cell phone. May be once in a while I send and receive an sms or save a number
in my address book. But anything beyond that is rocket science.