I know that some women (and men) don’t like when people divide things into male and female camps, but I have long believed that as a woman, I view technology differently than most men. I see it as a tool that should do what I need it to do, when I want it do do it, and without me having to understand how it all works. I don’t want to have to tinker with my tools to get them to work. If I need a hammer, I don’t want to have to forge the head, carve the handle, and affix them to each other before I can pound a nail into the wall and hang a picture.

A new laptop, with a new operating system (Windows 8, anyone?) and a new phone (because the other new phone stopped working for no apparent reason, six months before I could get a free upgrade) have left me pining for simpler times. Maybe not back to a dial phone — which I had to explain in detail to Darling Son this week, complete with drawings — or a manual typewriter. But I feel like every time things get “better”, they get more complex, easier to break, harder to learn, impossible to fix.

There are schools, communities, and households that single out days when no electronics are allowed. There are no electronics zones. I don’t want to go that far. I just want to return to a time when you could buy something and it would last, and if it broke, you got it fixed. And the price of that fix? It didn’t exceed the cost of a new gadget.

I don’t want my life run by my tools. I want to be in charge of them. What we need is more women involved in product design and execution. Maybe every guy who works on one of these things needs to ask his wife and his sister and his elderly mother for input. I bet I get emails and comments from the guys I know who work in high tech telling me they do this already. But obviously it’s not enough because I could line up 10 times as many friends who agree with me: that technology isn’t very intuitive; that it’s too hard to figure out what the problem is when something goes wrong; and that it costs too much to cure the ailment.

Now I have to go back to my phone, which currently won’t let me open text messages from the Mean Lady, many of which include reportedly gorgeous pictures of Not-So-Mean Baby. Or I could try to figure out why, as I type on my shiny new laptop, sometimes the charms panel pops up on my screen for no apparent reason (Windows 8 anyone?), usually right before the tile screen pops up for no apparent reason. And after none of my cogitating or hard or soft reboots work, I’ll give up and go to bed. Then I’ll put myself to sleep counting the ways I could permanently disable the gadgets that cause me grief. Many involve a hammer I’ve had for decades that has never needed fixing.

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Update: An hour with Verizon couldn’t fix my phone, but a few minutes with Mr. Right Now and some easy instructions from the good folks at Frontier and I have email again. The Frontier guy also sent me a new router, so things are slightly better on the Internet speed front. But I still hate this new laptop and don’t particularly care for Windows 8. I will refrain, for the time being, from chucking all my tech out the window. I reserve the right to continue to dream of doing it violence, though.