I don't think I was born too late. If anything, maybe I got here too soon.

Things started to go downhill for me shortly after the invention of the microwave oven. My first Radar Range, a contraption weighing only slightly less than a Volkswagen and probably emitting enough radiation to qualify as a pulsar, was at the outside edge of my technical abilities. It had two timer knobs and three buttons.

Then came VCRs and remote controls for televisions. More buttons, more functions, more incomprehensible choices of which I have zero command.

Invariably, when I try to use the remote to ask the television to play Channel 2, I end up looking at some sort of blue screen that won't even go away if I turn the TV off and on several times and curse.

Heck, if I had any idea how to turn off the boom boxes my children leave on when they depart, I wouldn't have to yank the cords out of the sockets to stop the music.

And then there is the computer that I have anchored in a common area so I can monitor what the kids are doing. - like I might have a clue what they are doing on it anyway. I just don't get all that clicking around I see people doing.

Recently a co-worker, who refers to the Internet as the oracle, tried to explain the function of right clicking on the mouse. I didn't quite understand and I don't expect to ever have to use it.

On the rarest of occasions and with much handholding and deep reservations, I have entered the realm of online shopping. I don't surf the Web and I don't do e-mail.

The messages on my answering machine have always held my children's voices because I had no idea how to record one until just a few weeks ago. That's when I got caught by my children using choice words to the answering machine as I tried to make it remember my chosen words.

I was given a lesson on how to make it work, but since the machine broke a few days ago, it'll be back to square one on that front.

Even my new electric range is problematic. I just keep on pushing buttons until it seems like the oven has begun heating and hope for the best when it comes to temperature and time.

When it became obvious I was going to have to have a cell phone, I dragged my feet into the wireless age. Those same children have nearly done themselves serious injury from laughing so hard as I tried to master the gadget.

After one year, I can answer a call, place one and if I'm lucky, put in a new entry. Apparently I have the call-waiting feature on my phone, but for quite a while I wondered what that stupid beeping noise was while I was talking.

Once, by pushing buttons at random, I managed to pick up the waiting call. As to the person I was already speaking to, I guess he's still on hold - if I have a hold button, that is.

And then I bought a laptop computer. To do this, I explained to someone else what I needed it to do, which was nothing more than a word processor, and he placed the order with additions he knew I would need.

When it arrived in the mail, he kindly turned it on for me and pushed the required setup buttons. And it was all good.

Until the computer in the living room quit responding to commands and it became obvious I needed to have Internet access on my laptop.

Clearly this is beyond my technical ability, so I enlisted the help of my older daughter. With an immobilizer on her arm until the cast could be applied for her broken wrist, we began the process.

With the laptop plugged into the wall socket and the phone line plugged into the laptop and cell phone plugged into the charger, me with zero knowledge of what to do, and her with only one usable hand and me holding the cell phone to her ear, we began a three-hour conversation with some guy in Manila. The poor man nearly did himself bodily injury alternately laughing and pulling his hair out.

There is no way I long for a simpler age when only clothing came with buttons. I like having the wondrous things the electronic age has brought.

If only I had been born a little later when everything will respond to voice recognition. I dream of the day when I can tell the oven what I want it to do and it obeys.

Of course, as a mother of teenagers, I dream of the day when I can tell my children what I want them to do and they obey. If that idea doesn't make you hurt yourself laughing, nothing will.

Karen Baier is an Eagle staff writer and works out of the Cranberry Eagle office.