When it comes to modern technologies, I'd like to think I'm not a hopeless case.

For instance, I've always been able to reset the time on electronic gizmos made in any country on Earth without needing to read the directions! This is a valuable skill about six or seven times a year-- on time-change weekends and whenever the power goes out.

And also ...

Well, that's it, actually. I can't think of any other example of my triumphing over the intricacies of a high-tech gadget. If it comes with a thick user's manual and requires electrical cables of any sort, I'm gonna have trouble. Television, TV accessories, computers, printers, digital cameras, cell phones -- I'm pretty much resigned to accomplishing the bare minimum with them and leaving their multi-faceted wonders to be explored by greater minds than my own.

Like, say, my kids. Two weeks ago, my son decided he wanted to watch a DVD. So he did. Just like that.

I should explain that I bought the DVD player more than a year ago, when the last one just up and died. I attempted to hook up the new apparatus with the television set and cable box all by myself. I pored over the manual, trying to identify which three or four of the 30 possible holes were the right ones and hoping the old cables would work on the new equipment, which didn't come with all it needed.

After a couple of hours and three attempts, I hit the wall. Literally. You see, when I popped in a DVD and hit play, the machine's little digital read-out said it was playing and the seconds were clicking by, but nothing appeared on the TV screen, except whatever channel the cable box was set to.

Maybe it was a problem with the remote control. I pored over the manual again, trying to find the magical combination of buttons that would make the DVD's images actually appear on the screen. Nothing worked. I gave up.

For a year, the DVD player gathered dust. We watched no movies, no family videos, no nothin' that didn't come from the cable company. We didn't have the time or the energy to tackle the problem. We stopped thinking about it. We led reasonably happy lives.

Until two weeks ago, when my son decided to enjoy a new concert by his favorite band. He watches virtually no television and wasn't aware that our DVD player didn't work. From the next room I saw him pop in the disc and fiddle for a few seconds with the remote. Within seconds a pounding bass filled the house and there were the musicians' heads nodding emphatically in unison.

"How'd you do that?" I marveled.

"What?"

"How'd you make the DVD picture actually show up on the screen?"

He looked at me with great sorrow. "I punched the auxiliary button."

Shaking my head at my own ineffectiveness, I went back to whatever I was writing at the computer. The computer works because we paid an expert to come to our house, set up the system and explain it to us, slowly.

But I was too embarrassed -- or cheap -- to pay someone to help me master the TV set-up, and it turns out your teenagers can do it for free. (Well, as much as you can claim that anything involving your teenagers is free. ...)

I salve my wounded pride by telling myself that I don't have time to waste fiddling with technology, which might be true, and that I don't have the desire, which is definitely true.

The truth is that we make time for what matters most to us, and for me, technology is mostly a means to an end. It's pragmatic but not very pleasurable. Well-designed, high-tech gadgets offer some visual pleasure and as much abstract, intellectual pleasure as you desire and can comprehend.

But it's not a sensual experience. The surfaces are too uniform and unyielding. Their cool charms wear off in a flash.

Like many adults, I spend a lot of my day in abstractions, reading, thinking and writing at a computer, so with the little time I control, I want to experience organic, tactile and aromatic pleasures. I want to bake a carrot cake and play through some Brahms piano pieces and putter around in my garden.

I don't want to fuss around with cables and gigabytes. I'll happily pay someone else to do that for me, though not without regret. Years ago, when I bought my first new computer, I hired a pro to come set it all up and offered him the old heap -- an Atari, I think -- for free.

"It doesn't work anymore," I said.

He held up some flat wire ribbon thingy. "That's because you have this cable hooked up backwards."

It's not that they're dragging me into the future, kicking and screaming. I'm going there willingly, but I'm limping a bit, and taking lots of pleasant detours.