Appliances Leave Her Feeling Inferior

Let me begin with a confession: I am living over my head.

This is not an economic tale of woe. There are no yachts on my credit card, no BMWs in my driveway, no bounced checks on my bank account.

I am not living over my head financially. I’m living over it technologically.

My house has gradually become home to equipment that is made to do all sorts of things that I am unable to make it do. If the building were a book it would be titled: Smart Appliances, Foolish Owner.

I have an oven that would start cooking while I’m at work if I could only tell it to. I have a telephone that is ready to store the numbers of my nearest and farthest if I will only do my share. I have a CD/ radio/tape deck that puts 26 separate functions in the hands of one dysfunctional operator.

And I haven’t even mentioned the computer.

I am not sure how this happened. The most complicated appliance under my parents’ roof was a toaster whose sole duty was to pop up bread from time to time. When I was a kid, we acquired a television set. While I never really knew how television worked, I knew how to make it work.

But now every time something breaks or is sacrificed to the consumer god of planned obsolescence - try finding an ordinary record player; check the value of last year’s computer - it is replaced by something new and improved. Which, of course, offers new and improved features.

Now, the word “features” should send every techno-challenged, simplicity-longing consumer screaming into the midnight of the mall parking lot. A feature is something that you do not want, do not want to pay extra for, will never use, but cannot get the thing you do want without.

Consider the television that entered our bedroom after its 20-year-old predecessor rained technicolor snow down upon Frasier’s Seattle and collapsed. The “feature” that we wanted was a set of cordless headphones - otherwise known as the Marriage Saving Component - to allow one of us to read or sleep while the other (who shall remain nameless) watched various large men pursuing various shaped balls across various shaped playing fields.

For reasons too arcane to mention, having to do with cable companies and astrological signs, the only television set that met this requirement came with the following features: a picture within a picture, wraparound sound, a clock, a timer, an on-screen menu, a channel caption guide, a remote control that could run a 747 and a price tag roughly the equivalent of the one on my first car.

Six months later, I have yet to figure out how - let alone why - to watch two pictures at once. The television sits there in mute (or wraparound stereo) disapproval. It’s added to the queasy, guilty sensation, utterly unknown to my grandparents, that I am not measuring up to my own possessions.

And I haven’t even mentioned the computer.

The proof that my era is higher-tech than I am is in the fact that every purchase now comes with a textbook known as an owner’s manual, or worse, an operator’s manual. The plow did not come with an operating manual. Nor did the toaster.

Anything that comes with a manual has features. I have, by actual count, eight manuals, many of which were written by the same salaryman who majored in Egyptian hieroglyphics and reads S-and-M comics on the way to work. One of these textbooks is 38 pages long and the only chapter I have mastered is called: “Watching the TV.”

The way I figure it, a fully equipped American family can either learn what’s in the manuals or what’s in the national budget. In roughly the same amount of time, they can master their equipment - with its features - or the intricacies of chaos theory.

The end result is that for the first time, many of us are living in domestic partnership with machines whose primary feature is to make us feel dumb. Our haven from the heartless world is now a place where we can fail to live up to the potential of our VCRs and constantly be rebuked by our tape decks.

So the problem for me isn’t keeping up with the Joneses. It’s keeping up with the Toshibas. When all is said and done, I’m delighted to have a roof over my head. But not so happy to have a TV that’s over my head.

And, oh, did I mention the computer?

xxxx