Too Old to Twitter, Too Young to Die: they call me ma'am now

I have a niece attending college at nearby UCLA, which is nice for me, because I get to see her often. Last week, she experienced a new milestone: We were lunching at a restaurant, and the waitress taking the order asked her:

“And what would you like, Ma’am?”

Yup. She got “ma’am”ed.

It’s all downhill from here, I told her gleefully.

Of course, at my age, I get a lot worse than “ma’am.” My favorite was last year, when I purchased my current laptop computer. I handed the sales clerk my credit card and driver’s license for identification, and he said:

“You’re the same age as my mom.”

As if this news would please me.

I understand; he was just being friendly. He was trying to connect by making conversation. But that conversation quickly went downhill with his next remark:

“Would you like us to set your computer up for you? It’s free.”

Maybe I was being too sensitive. They probably make this offer to all their customers. But I am perfectly capable of loading my own stinking programs and files on to my own new computer, and following the previous comment about my age, I reflexively said the one thing I shouldn’t:

“I’ve been using computers since before you were born.”

I know. The only thing I didn’t do was cackle “Sonny Boy.” But he really got my dander up. What makes the current generation think that people my age are incapable of using technology? Or that we are unable to fathom the usefulness of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter?

Where do they think we’ve been the last twenty years?

I have been using email since 1982. Back then, I was communicating with clients on a little all-in-one terminal that included a modem and coupler and a dot matrix printer on thermal paper.  You connected to an online network at 300 baud (anyone remember The Source?) by sticking your telephone receiver into the coupler.

I soon found other things I could do online besides business email. I discovered the chat room. They weren’t called that back then; a rival service called CompuServe labeled theirs “CB,” after the citizens band radio fad of just a few years earlier.

I got hooked on CB. I bought myself a little Commodore Vic 20: 20K of RAM, storage on a cassette deck and a 300 baud modem. This baby didn’t come with a monitor; you had to hook it up to your television.

I racked up a $300 CB bill my first month on CompuServe and had to cut back, but not before acquiring my own online stalker, who showed up one day on my doorstep… and I was even a guest at an online chat room wedding.

Having abandoned the Vic 20, I eventually met the man who would become my husband, in a chat room. It was 1989. By then, I was frequenting local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) with an IBM XT. That was a nice little machine. It ran on DOS and came bundled with some actual, useful programs. I became something of an expert in WordPerfect; figuring out how to create complicated macros with popup menus.

My husband and I were early adopters. This was before we had a house or a child (two of the greatest money suckers you can acquire!).  I acquired my first laptop, a Toshiba with a 386 processor and an active matrix LCD screen. It ran Windows 3 with a little trackball gadget you hooked onto a port on the side.  My husband scoured the area for an affordable non-interlaced monitor for his new desktop 486 (he doesn’t like being outdone). We upgraded our favorite software titles on a regular basis.

I used to back everything up – religiously. (Of course, it was easier when you had just 20 megabytes on your hard drive!)

And we tried out new online services as they debuted. There was Prodigy, owned by Sears, which had what amounted (at the time) to really cool CGA graphics.  But serving the graphics was slow, and Prodigy had all these annoying Sears ads at the bottom of their screens. We had similar misgivings about America Online, which had debuted strong with a splashy ad campaign.

We tried them and didn’t like them. We stuck to our friends on the local BBSes.

Then, my  husband got wind of something called Mosaic, which was turning the Internet into something called the World Wide Web. He became obsessed with getting it all to work. By this time, I was pregnant with our daughter. He celebrated by creating a little website for her, complete with a scan of our ultrasound and a little poll whereby our friends could help us pick out her name.

It was 1996.

By the turn of the century, I was a stay-at-home mom, work-at-home mom, building my own website for other mothers like me. I was networking with women on sites like iVillage, Home Based Working Mom, and ClubMom.

Three years later, I became a blogger.

Today, I am LinkedIn,  MySpaced, up to my applicated eyeballs on Facebook, and a dedicated Twitterista.

Don’t tell me 50-somethings don’t understand a thing or two about cyberspace. We had our own hand in inventing it. And some people get that. In fact, midlife bloggers are being acknowledged this year at South by Southwest, with a panel tited "Just Over 50 and Not Dead Yet."

This panel will be held on Saturday, March 8 at 11:30 a.m., live chat link here. If, like me, you can't make it, a transcript will be available here.