The One With Aldacron

I don’t have a printer. I’ve never had an urgent need to purchase one. So on the rare occasion that I need to print materials up for one of my classes, I normally copy them to a floppy. Since I teach in office buildings these days, I can always count on a printer being nearby. What I hadn’t ever considered until the other day was the availability of floppy disk drives.

Several of my current classes are with the human resources department at SK Telecom. My agent emailed me some attendance rosters some time ago, so I thought I’d carry a floppy in and get them printed up. I hit a high mark on the surprise scale when I learned that there wasn’t a floppy disk drive anywhere in the office.

A trend I’ve noticed more and more is that desktop computers in Korean offices (at least at the big corporations where I teach) are disappearing. Workers use laptops instead. The computers are taken home in the evening and brought back and hooked up the next day. What I hadn’t noticed is that, rather than lugging around external floppy disk drives, most people are using USB memory sticks.

That’s not all. While I was in the States last month my father gave me a digital camera he wasn’t using. It’s relatively new and puts out good quality pictures. I was able to grok the functions and navigate the menu in short order. When I went to Best Buy to pick up an extra memory card or two, the clerk asked me, “What size do you need?”. I answered, “Well, it’s really small. Like a little mini-floppy.” From that point on the clerk treated me like a moron. And deservedly so, I realized, after I found out what she really meant.

Back in Korea I discovered that my father had not given me the USB cable that came with the camera. Noticing that the slot on the camera is much smaller than a regular USB slot, I realized that I had nothing in the house to use. So I went to buy one and took the camera with me. The clerk I spoke to kept trying to sell me something else, saying that it’s a better option, and I kept refusing. Now, had the transaction been in English I wouldn’t have been so stubborn. What he was trying to sell me was a card reader. The word he was using in Korean was new to me, and I really didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. But when he finally asked to see the card for my camera and determined it to be an SD card, he pulled a card reader out and showed it to me. At that point I got the picture and bought the card reader. I agree, it’s a much better option than using a cable directly from the camera.

So my digital camera and floppy disk experiences have shown me that I’m not as “with-it” as I had thought. I’m not exactly low-tech, but I’m definitely not on the bleeding edge. I usually get rather cocky and beligerent when people try to explain tech-related stuff to me, since I’m such a know-it-all. Now, I’ll have to keep my ears open and actually pay attention. I’ve got some catching up to do.