Early Adopters

It would be safe to say, I'm not an early adopter.

I admit this, because there are witnesses... witnesses who will be more than happy to confirm that I am the person who said, "this email thing will never catch on," and whined loudly from my 1980's Edit Desk when the writers stopped bringing me disks I could read.

So 2008 was a big year for me.

In February, I ditched my seven-year-old Nokia for a BlackBerry, under protest, and only because I'd finally worn the number eight off that phone.

By summer, my friends Elle and Kimmy dragged me kicking and screaming onto Facebook and MySpace.

A little after that, my banker sent me so many WSJ articles about Twitter that I felt compelled to sign on for fear he might stop cashing my checks.

And by Thanksgiving, my friend Tex had talked me into manning not one, but two blogs. (When I say "talked me into it," I mean: we sat down with some beignets and he mashed a lot of buttons on his laptop, and suddenly, I was a blogger. A blogger lightly dusted from head to toe in powdered sugar.)

When I told him I didn't adapt easily to new technology, he said I reminded him of what his Little League baseball coaches had said once of him -- that it's like watching me run the bases with a piano strapped to my back.

Sounds about right.

Sometime in 2009, I will have an entirely new website at work. By way of direction, I only told the guys renovating it that it must be idiot-proof -- that they should be picturing Lenny in Of Mice and Men when they're thinking of the person who'll be updating it at 3 a.m.

Sometime in January, I'll have a new laptop.

These are not baby-steps, for me.

My friend Ian doesn't even have a cell phone, and over Christmas Eve dinner, he had the same facebook complaints I did -- i.e., we don't know HOW to put your seahorse back in the ocean, or clean your garden, or catch the Duke Sucks wave. Pleeeease stop asking us.

But 2009 will be different.

I have told Wes at TAO and Dave at Elevation that I'd like for them to team up and build me an iCar this year, and then install a thought portal into my head so that I can just communicate directly, without the bother of a keyboard (otherwise, Dr. Nick is going to have to treat me for carpal tunnel).

I'll show YOU an early adopter.