How Do We Do What We Do?

Yesterday a friend sent me an email complimenting me on my blog, noting as well that he had wanted to make a comment where it seems provided for one at the base of the text, but did not seem to have the technology to do so.  I told him that others over the years had had the same experience, and that to my memory there was only one person, a gentleman who wrote code for a living, who had ever managed to make a comment on the blog.  I got in touch with this person, and he wrote back that one simply had to go to the lower portion of the page and follow the procedure there.  With sinking heart I tried that, and of course there was no way that I could manage anything.  There were no instructions; you had to intuit it all.  I remember when I first got an what ? an Apple Two perhaps in 1984 at the suggestion of a forward looking younger friend who thought perhaps it was time for me who was an established writer to move on from ball point pen and pads of yellow lined paper. which then had to be transcribed onto my electric typewriter.  There were no significant instructions with this Apple, no booklet, as I remember.  I do remember spending two of the most soul-wrenching weeks of my life, up in my study,  crying in frustration and desperation.  And so it has been over the years as I progressed to the big Mac computer, the lap top, the ipad, the iphone.  I remember struggling for months to figure out how to add pagination to one of those Apple writing programs.  And I discovered chat rooms where people with Macs shared with each other arcane bits of technology about the writing programs.  I went to the Apple Store signed up for seminars heard bright young things talking about all the fabulous apps you could add to your machine but never getting into the basics of the process.  I thought to myself what if car dealerships were this indifferent to the driving knowledge of their customers?  Even greater mayhem on American roads!  My husband who is far more interested in process and detail and know-how (I just want to write the damned book, I don't care how it is achieved!) is always pointing out nuggets of technical information when we are having what passes for marital conversation in this the twilight of our lives, nuggets that I cannot digest and intellectually spit out like baby with its first green peas.  People are always telling me brightly all the fabulous things they can do on their computers, phones, pads.  I walk through life like the deaf, dumb, and blind, and having seen the film of the life of Steve Jobs, nay having read the bio, I know what fundamental arrogance eminates from Cupertino or wherever it is the company lurks.  I have written probably five or six books on a computer, but I always expect when I open it up in the morning that the pages will have vanished.  That has actually happened to me. I do not know what I am doing, and at last at this late date I don't really care.