Bruce Cameron

Jun 05, 20130

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2008.

I consider myself multitalented because I can make toast. Whenever the family gathers for a big breakfast, I’m in my corner, cranking out the toast with such efficiency that people often comment on it.

“All Dad ever does is make the toast, while we do everything else,” they’ll praise.

“How’s the toast?” I’ll ask proudly.

“Pretty good,” they’ll say. “Maybe a little too much butter.”

“Too much butter, or is it just that you don’t like that much butter?” I’ll counter wisely, because when you are as talented as I am in this area, you can perceive things that other people might not.

You’d think that having mastered such a complex undertaking I’d be pretty much left alone to practice my art. But as it turns out, the world is a much more complicated place than it used to be. Take, for example, the simple task of producing a weekly newspaper column, which my editor cruelly expects me to do every week.

When I first started writing, all I had to do was take a piece of paper, put it in the typewriter, stare at it blankly for four hours and then call my editor to plead for more time. Pressing a key resulted in a letter appearing on the page in a very uncomplicated process almost toast-like in its beauty.

Now, though, when I write a column and click on the “print” button, I get a message like this: Your document did not print because the printer driver is incompatible and we hate you we hate you, ha ha ha!

That’s the gist of it, anyway: My printer thinks it’s being driven, and whoever is doing the driving is “incompatible,” a word high-school girls used to employ when they described why they did not want to go out with me or see my face. I’m expected to know how to fix the thing — me, the guy who makes toast!

The other day a guy pointed his cell phone at my stomach and said, “Here, let me beam you my business card.” Sure, and then later we’ll go out in the parking lot and fight with light sabers.

I don’t know how to catch a business card with my stomach! (Turns out he was pointing at my cell phone, which I don’t know how to work, either.)

It’s no longer enough that I turn in a weekly column on time, or at least not so late that I deserve all this drama from my editor, and that I can make toast with exactly the right amount of butter despite what my kids say. No, I need to master a variety of technologies just to survive — man does not, as the saying goes, live by toast alone.

So my phone is apparently stuffed with magic-fairy-dust business cards, and I need to hire a chauffer for my printer. My air conditioner won’t turn on unless I lie to it and tell it the time is 4:00 p.m. My car wants me to check my engine — I checked ... it’s an engine. My microwave has more menu items than a Chinese restaurant — it can thaw, roast, sunburn, inflame, cremate and sonogram. (But it cannot, no matter how many buttons I push, toast a piece of bread, so ha ha ha.) My coffee pot beeps at me for no reason; sometimes the dishwasher sings along, with the dryer on bass.

My son is exasperated with me. “Dad, I’ve told you a thousand times, if you want to watch a DVD, all you have to do is push button ‘B’, disable the wireless, castigate the filaments and dongle the fleebe plasmastic klaxtor mixtronic eletro-floyd.”

This may not be exactly what he says. It doesn’t matter anyway: When I want to watch a DVD, all I have to do is ask my son to come over.

I understand that reasonable people like my son and unreasonable people like my editor expect that I’ll take new technology in stride, mastering these new devices so that all I have to do is glance at my microwave and it will bark like a seal. But I don’t care what they want.

I say, let them eat toast.

(Bruce Cameron is an author and syndicated columnist with a webnsite at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.)