OPINION: Facebook makes my head spin

I opened a Facebook account and now you are all suffering along with me

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I'M NOT sure what the protocol is but I've been sending Facebook "friend" requests like a wild man.

Yep. I've come out of the dark ages and got myself a Facebook page.

And many of you will have received a request for your friendship as a result.

Then nothing. Total silence.

Sorry. I'm taking baby steps and aren't exactly sure what to do next.

I'm not the brightest bloke in the world when it comes to computers.

"The boy's not real bright," was how my teachers put it. And that was before they even invented computers. I don't want to shock any young readers but we didn't have computers when I was in high school. Not a single one.

My Year 11 high school class was one of the first to do "computer studies" in 1978. But it was all theory.

We leant about coding or something. Lots of dots and dashes on pieces of paper which, we were promised, would one day be useful in making a computer work.

But we weren't real sure what these computer things were.I know, I know. What a sad and sorry world we must have lived in. It all seems a long time ago and I tell you these things so you can understand why computers frustrate me.

They're great when they are working, but I tend to get a bit antsy when they start going slow or I hit too many keys at once and they get confused and sit there staring blankly at me.

When that happens, I do what most people my age do. . . I start yelling at the screen. When that doesn't work, I start pounding my fist on the desk (while still yelling at the screen). Then, while yelling at the screen and pounding my fist on the desk, I start stamping my feet.

My wife refers to it as the "cranky old man using a computer two-step" and she just laughs if she catches me. She feels a bit superior because she did a TAFE computer class about a hundred years ago.

She reckons it's about time I enrolled for one, thereby ignoring my argument that if they just built smarter computers I wouldn't have a problem in the first place. So I opened a Facebook account instead. And now you're all suffering.

Originally published as OPINION: Facebook makes my head spin