I made a huge mistake years ago when I refused to learn how to use e-mail at my work. I persisted in communicating using those little pink memo papers long after most of my co-workers were using their computers. I have been behind, way behind, the curve ever since.

I managed for years in Hawaii with only a landline telephone and an answering machine. Mobile phones were starting to be seen but they were heavy, as big as a shoe box and far from common so I could ignore them. As they got smaller and more people had them, I looked the other way. Fiddle dee-dee, this isn't for me. Call me at home and leave a message if you want to talk to me. I'm just an old-fashioned kind of girl.

Just before I came to China I admitted that I probably needed a computer. I took several courses at the local college in Hawaii to acquaint me with it and promptly forgot all I learned. In China I managed, somehow, after many episodes of trial and error, to send and receive e-mail, to write stories on Word and to Google information. That was the extent of my abilities for several years.

Sending pictures home was not only far out of my league, it really didn't matter because I traveled with a notebook and pen, not a camera. Also, I take terrible pictures.

Time and technology march on and wait for no one. Several friends began to get annoyed with me because I didn't have a mobile phone. On a trip to Yunnan province, I finally took a camera but retired it pretty fast. I discovered that with a camera I was always looking for the shot and missing the big picture of the sights and sounds around me. Back to the notebook and pen.

I did notice, however, how easy it was for my friends to keep in contact with each other as the trip went on. Since I can get lost in my own backyard and still didn't speak Chinese, I began to toy with the idea of getting a mobile. My friend Faye beat me to it. She gave me one as a birthday gift and finally I was up to speed. Sort of. I could receive calls and call out, but texting, saving numbers and using it as an alarm were far beyond my capabilities.

This sorry state of affairs continued until, quite by chance, an iPhone appeared in my life. What they say is true. They are intuitive and even a technological moron like me could text, check the weather, take the occasional (bad) picture, play a simple game and use it as an alarm. I was flush with success.

The techno gods smiled upon me once more and I was gifted with an e-reader. Like all book lovers I had protested that I loved the feel of a book, the turning of the pages, blah, blah, blah, but 10 years of being only able to read what I could find in the foreign language bookstores, which wasn't much, I began to waver. The gift of a Kindle seemed like a godsend. The problem is I can't figure out how to use many of its functions even with the 131-page manual by my side.

You'd think I'd figure out that I remain at the Neanderthal stage of technical know-how. Instead I bought an iPad the minute the price went down. Why? You might well ask. It's a question I should have put to myself before I got caught up in the fever of buying one.

So now I sit with a computer I can barely use, a mobile phone which has hundreds of functions and thousands of apps and I can use six of them, a Kindle I can't seem to order books on and an iPad I hardly dare touch. Help!

China Daily