Amid all the offers of drugs to improve my sexual performance and Russian women desperate to ‘meet man lik you’, my email occasionally offers sage advice from people I’ve actually agreed to hear from.
Despite, at 46, being too old to learn, I keep being told by all around me that ‘you’re never too old to learn’.
Hence, I recently joined the social networking crowd with a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/Bunkybowers) and a Facebook page.
And, thanks to people out there who know things I couldn’t possibly hope to understand, I’ve even managed to set my blog up to post automatically to Twitter and Facebook as soon as something appears.
OK, so it’s not rocket science – but it might as well be for all I knew about it before reading the ‘how to’ pages on the interwebby thing.
But the great thing about web-based activities and computer software, I’ve discovered, is how much you can learn simply by getting and ‘having a go’. If you get it wrong, things don’t crash around your feet – you simply start again and learn from the errors.
The modern age is great for that, because working in Photoshop or Illustrator, designing websites, or using social network tools is a world away from the industries I knew as a lad.
Born and bred in Portsmouth, many of my contemporaries went to work in the Naval Dockyard as apprentices. And I’m bloody sure on their first day they weren’t told by the gaffer “just go and try to fit those rivets into the side of the Ark Royal – you’ll soon get the hang of it”. Or “take this screwdriver and try to rewire that nuclear missile launcher – you can’t do any harm”.
They had years of extensive training. With many of the 21st century industries being in the ‘virtual world’ it is much easier to be self-taught, which also means there are areas where the ‘expertise’ is likely to be lacking a little something.
Most people, like me, get by. I’m no expert. But I know enough now on lots of things to be able to hold my own – a habit I first developed as a teenager, though it was frowned upon by polite society in the 70s.
Traditional industries – and by ‘traditional’ I mean stuff before computers took over the world and sent Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to save us all – don’t allow for a ‘little knowledge’ and require a lot of training and tuition.
This was brought home to me in spades earlier in the week when, as a parent of a prospective student, I was shown around the chemistry department of the University of Sheffield.
My chemistry knowledge is very limited, as I took the subject for only one year at school. And my place in dunces’ corner was confirmed when we arrived at the department and I thought the periodic table on the wall in reception was the seating plan for a lecture theatre…
But my complete ignorance was brought home during the tour when Dr Jim Thomas, one of the members of staff tasked with dragging round idiots such as I, spouted forth in one of the laboratories about the machinery doing ‘some of the basics of chemistry’.
From what I understood - and it wasn't much - it took something, smashed it to pieces, and then tried to discover its constituent parts. I wanted to know why it smashed up whatever it was that it smashed up in the first place. I’m sure there was a damned good reason but I know not what it is.
But for the most part my lack of basic knowledge meant Jim’s words made the same sound as those of the teacher in the TV Charlie Brown cartoons: “Wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa.”
It’s a good job the self-taught philosophy doesn’t apply in those labs, otherwise I get the feeling parts of the University of Sheffield might have been relocated to Barnsley and other areas of south Yorkshire some time ago.
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