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January 2000

Island Living 33: The Geezer Geeks are Here
by A. D. Coleman

At the end of my last column, it was the end of July, and I was wandering through MacWorld Expo in New York City's Javits Center, being very, very afraid.

What scared me? Not the ridiculous time-warped Microsoft booth with its presenters dressed up as the Village People, every half-hour bursting robotically into some Bill Gates promo to the tune of "Join the Navy"; that was just sad, and dumb. No, it was the fact that I understood about fifty percent of what was going on. And what's spooky is not that I was up to speed on only half of it, but that I was able to comprehend as much as I did. For example:

  • I deciphered without help the symbolism of the music chosen to precede Steven Jobs's keynote talk on Wednesday morning: Buddy Holly, the Ventures, and other garage-band classics. That's what one cluster of teenagers made happen with little more than electricity and creative genius. The Mac is what another gang of adolescents did with the same raw materials; it's the garage-band rock & roll of the computer world.

  • I knew without being told that the young guy who walked out when Jobs was announced wasn't Jobs at all, but rather Noah Wylie, who played him to perfection in the recent HBO movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

  • I got most of Jobs's presentation, and even explained some of it to the delightful young Japanese correspondent who seated herself beside me. (Of course, Jobs is no spring chicken, now pushing geezerdom himself. One of us, one of us.)

  • After a few minutes of hands-on and a quick look at the specs, I found myself with an immediate opinion about the iBook, Apple's new consumer portable. (It's perfect for your mom; she can buy a fun purse to match.)

  • A very helpful talk with a rep from FileMaker Pro clarified a problem I've been having with a sales-and-inventory program for writers that I'm developing with that software.

  • The term "relational database" no longer terrifies me, I discovered, since I now know what it means. Ditto for "records" and "fields."

  • Watching a demo of the new release of GoLive! Cyberstudio, a website management program, my jaw dropped open as I realized the time-saving value of one added feature -- and the speaker spotted me, laughed, and threw me a prized T-shirt.

  • I admired and coveted the new edition of Adobe Photoshop.

  • Reps from three accounting-software programs -- QuickBooks Pro, M.Y.O.B. Plus, and Aatrix -- talked me through the comparative pros and cons of their variations on that theme, and I was able to get answers to the questions that concerned me about their products' options and limitations.

  • Worst of all, I've become a Mac addict, so devoted that I'll show up at a Mac-specific souk like this one for two days running; moreover, whenever possible I'm working with Mac and Claris software -- I even do all my writing now in AppleWorks 5.

I'm not sure you get the full ramifications of all this. Let me spell it out: Here you have a guy who showed no aptitude for hard science or math past the eighth grade; who hated every minute of his three years in hell at Stuyvesant, one of New York City's three science-intensive high schools; and who could never fathom the workings of the slide rule (commonly carried by my classmates in a leather pouch attached to their belts, like some nerd version of a Bowie knife), the very sight of which used to make him twitch. Today he's happily, cheerfully, willingly strolling around a computer trade show with a bunch of other Mac fanatics, knowledgeably -- well, semi-knowledgeably -- talking computer shop with all and sundry, covering the event in his professional capacity as a frequent writer on matters electronic and cyberspatial. Don't you see? This means -- oh, the horror, the horror! -- that I'm on the verge of becoming (if I haven't already crossed the line) a computer geek. And that will make me . . . a geezer geek!

That's my personal crisis. Now here's yours: I'm not alone. Far from it. Once that recognition dawned, I started looking around, and the gray-hair count stunned me. Everywhere I turned -- even in the gaming area, though the demographics were lowest there -- I saw geezer geeks. It's probably ungentlemanly of me to say so, and of course I didn't ask, but Phyllis Wier, who publishes the magazines Digital New York and Digital Chicago, seems a probable geezer. At a private Peachpit Press dinner to which I got invited, many of the authors of that lucid series of how-to books were inarguably geezers. Mike Baron, at the show to represent SCORE, the Small Business Administration's volunteer wing -- unabashedly geezer. Software developers, hardware developers, peripherals manufacturers, programmers, editors, publishers, writers: geezers to the left of me, geezers to the right. Not to mention the countless geezer attendees. And most of them geezer geeks to boot, from what I gathered in direct conversation or overheard by dint of discreet but shameless eavesdropping.

Is the computer world ready for this? I think not. The hype, after all, tells us incessantly that it's a young person's technology. Maybe that was true once, but no more. Yet the only model we have of the geezer geek is the 1950s generation of Univac experts, those please-do-not-spindle-fold-or-mutilate guys with the short hair and the ties and the plastic pocket protectors. But today's geezer geek comes in far more flavors than the iMac, everything from your stereotypical housewife or gone-fishin' senior-citizen type to a wide assortment of "queer, odd, or eccentric" individuals, who collectively represent a steadily growing segment of the digitized and online population to which absolutely no one -- especially the computer designers and marketers -- is paying any attention whatsoever.

There's not a single computer product I've seen anywhere -- hardware, software, ergonomic work-station equipment -- that promotes itself as senior-friendly, much less senior-specific. The American Association of Retired Persons has since 1995 maintained a website -- www.aarp.org -- that includes an online version of the magazine. And the magazine regularly refers to digital technology: For example, a recent "Lifelines" column included a review of cooking-related software programs and reference to the "How Stuff Works" website.

Conversely, the computer industry does virtually no promotion to that burgeoning segment of the population. You won't find a single computer ad in most issues of the AARP’s magazine, Modern Maturity -- which has a circulation of 20.5 million people, many of them with substantial amounts of discretionary income to spend. (The special computer issue that kicked off 1999 had just one -- from Compaq. The March-April 1999 issue included Jennifer Reid Holman's "Is Your Computer Ready?" -- a piece on Y2K preparedness -- and no computer ads.)

And that means this industry is missing a serious bet. Because we geezer geeks aren't just coming, we're already here. Our ranks swell daily. Pretty soon -- you read it here first -- there'll be an AARP recruiting booth at the Mac and PC fairs; they're too savvy to ignore such a trend.

Now hear this: The time to start planning Geezer Geek Expo has arrived.

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© Copyright 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World Syndication Services,
P.O.B. 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002 USA.