Thus, Luddite is a reasonably accurate term to describe myself in relation to my newest high-tech toys. Ignorance certainly played a part, as did the possibility of using the technology wrongly. The annoyance that comes with misunderstanding a technology might have even led to acts of sabotage.

So call me a Luddite. Call me a dummy. Maybe even call me a fool. But if I’m a fool, what would you call the person who hasn’t owned three Palm devices, three cell phones, ten computers and a hybrid wired/wireless home network? Judge for yourself from the following confession.

Every few months I get e-commerce itch. The only cure for E. C. Itch involves visiting to a technology Web site and ordering something new for my office or road warrior armory. I had in mind a dictionary for my Palm M130 and a graduation gift for my daughter, Laura, who recently finished her Master’s degree at UCLA. Lucky for me, the Palm Website offered the dictionary as a free gift with the purchase of an M130, exactly what I wanted for Laura.

In addition, I wanted a small expansion card, also for my Palm. Sixteen megabytes would suffice, since that is twice the size of the standard memory in an M130. The expansion card, I was pleased to note, came with a freebie called a Bonzai USB Mini Drive. I had read about key-fob sized drives, so I was eager to try one.

When the items arrived, I checked the dictionary and expansion card for my own M130. It took about two minutes to figure them out, after which I loaded my library of books and Palm Reader onto the expansion card, freeing up about five megabytes of main memory.

I moved my e-books one-by-one over to the expansion card. When you have an e-library of sixty volumes, this process can be tedious. After I moved my books, I moved the Palm Reader, which promptly moved ALL of my books with it, overwriting the ones that I had previously moved. Nothing was damaged but my pride and the laundry, which wasn’t getting done while I was moving the sixty volumes one by one.

Next, I opened the package that held the Bonzai drive. The drive came with no documentation at all, not even an advertising card with a picture of the drive. The package included a small key-fob sized drive, a USB extension cable, and a lanyard (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

I had read that a USB drive has only to be plugged into a USB port in order for your computer to recognize it. So I plugged it into the USB port on my laptop. Windows XP recognized the hardware immediately and loaded the drivers. But I couldn’t find mention of the drive anywhere in My Computer or Windows Explorer.

I moved the Bonzai over to my old Windows 98 desktop. Here, Windows 98 prompted me to download the drivers, an easy task with a cable Internet connection. After the drivers were loaded, however, the Windows 98 system didn’t display the Bonzai as a drive either.

I finally opened the tiny door to the Bonzai drive and took a look inside. The drive looked like it was supposed to have a media card in it, but it was empty. I surfed to the Website and checked out the Bonzai drive customer support page. I downloaded the instructions manual and read the parts list. The Bonzai drive WAS supposed to come with a media card.

Why would someone ship an empty drive? It didn’t make sense to me unless this was part of an elaborate scheme to sell the media cards (which are not cheap.) I was composing an irritated letter in my head to fire off to the Palm website when I took another look at the drive.

The slot in the drive looked about the size of one of the Palm cards. I thought about inserting one in the tiny bay, but if the two weren’t compatible, one, or perhaps both, could get fried. Back on the Simple Tech Website, I looked at the specs for the Bonzai drive. It took SD (Secure Digital) and Multimedia Cards. On the Palm Website, I looked at the specs for the expansion card. The Palm expansion card was an SD card. Ergo, it should work in my Bonzai drive.

My clumsy hands had a certain amount of difficulty inserting the postage-stamp sized card into the drive. A younger less-Luddite would have no difficulty. After inserting the card, I plugged the Bonzai into my USB drive and got. . .nothing. At this point, I read the manual. I admit, even people who write manuals don’t read them until they HAVE to.

After rebooting my computer, as instructed, I inserted the Bonzai drive again. Its contents immediately popped up on My Computer and Windows Explorer as the E: drive (the DVD drive being D:) I could see all the files that I had loaded onto the drive via my M130. I could also save this article to the Bonzai drive. The drive had a little more room, but anything else I put there would take away space needed for my Palm library, in case 60 volumes isn’t enough.

That mystery solved, I fooled around with my expansion card for a while. Then I began to put my toys away. At this point, the lanyard drew my attention. If you read this magazine, you probably already know what a lanyard is, but since this particular column is aimed at novices, I’ll explain further.

A lanyard has replaced the pocket protector as de rigueur geek fashion. It is a cable of a width somewhere between a belt and a shoestring, usually made from fabric with a company or favorite team logo applied. The cable is worn around the neck with a clip to hold the ID badge required by many companies. Simple Tech has adapted this technology to another purpose: a convenient way to carry your Bonzai drive. The Bonzai drive on its lanyard might even be a convenient place to carry your SD card, since the card tends to run the battery down if you keep it in your PDA — something else I learned the hard way.

I also learned another down side to miniature devices. I was digging through some past copies of PC Alamode. I didn’t find what I wanted, so I closed the file drawer and went on about writing. An hour or so later, I couldn’t find my Bonzai drive. Since the expansion card and drive cover were on my desk, I wouldn’t, even in a senior moment, have carried it off somewhere. My husband and I spent a considerable amount of time crawling around on the floor under my desk, without finding it.

After a while, I realized that I had been looking through my PC Alamodes when last I saw the drive. I opened the file drawer, where it sat, on top of the files. I can be thankful that it didn’t slip down between the folders and become a tiny capsule of technology suspended in time, to be later discovered as an artifact reminiscent of a remote past when we carried our files on enormous, postage-stamp sized media.

So now this Luddite is educated, perhaps a bit late, in the workings of SD media technologies, and also that those tiny buggers are easy to lose. I read recently that technology is getting so smart that it is outsmarting most of us. It’s certainly ahead of me.

I was mulling this concept over the dishwasher, wondering if I had been too hasty to dismiss in a past article the idea of an Internet fridge and clothes washer. With current technology as it is, a surgeon in Los Angeles can use a remote robotic arm to operate on a patient in Anchorage. It is comforting to think that when I’m too much of a Luddite to run my own dishwasher, someone across the Internet can do it for me.