A lot of us in the first half of the Baby Boom generation are having some trouble with all this new-fangled technology stuff that is swamping the developed world. Certainly, it is playing hob with my brain.

The inspiration for this was casting my eyes on a stick of what we once called Wite-Out — referring to its brand name.

Wite-Out. Who uses Wite-Out anymore? Does anyone under 40 even know what it is? (I will explain shortly.)

Other signs of a guy behind the times:

1. Next to the Wite-Out … a mechanical pencil. With an eraser. Yes, for writing and erasing. By hand.

2. I most recently used the mechanical pencil — it would have been  a No. 3 Ticonderoga pencil-pencil if a decent sharpener could be found in the UAE — to enter information into a weekly planner. A little book. With pages. Which I carry around with me. Many of the pages in the book are covered with the names, addresses and phone numbers of people, some of whom must be dead, considering I’ve been carrying the address book part of it for at least 30 years. Everyone keeps this info in their phone now, yes? Not me.

3. Speaking of phone numbers … I am sitting about four feet from a land line. An active land line. I can pick it up and dial people. Of course, I can’t walk far with the land line because it is plugged into the wall. But the handset does have an earpiece and a mouthpiece that wind up in the general area of my ear and mouth, when I am speaking/listening. That’s handy. Try it sometime.

4. Close at hand is spiral notebook, about 8.5 x 11 inches, with 150 pages in it … in which I will enter, by hand, 26 weeks of statistics for three 25-man fantasy baseball teams. Some people claim our league could get a stat service to do this, for a fee (but I wonder about some of our more arcane rules being lost) … and four of us will compile stats, by hand, for six months involving 12 teams. What is more analog than that?

5. Also on this dinner table is a full copy of a daily local newspaper. The National, of course. I pay a fairly small amount of money, and a guy comes up to our floor, every morning, in the apartment tower, and slides the newspaper under my door. Four sections (news, business, sports, features). About 50 pages. Full of information. At my front door. What a concept.

6. Across the room is a shelf with about 25 books on it. In their corporeal form, with all their heft and space-eating. (Including 942 paperback pages of Don Quixote.) If I wasn’t concerned about having to carry out the books (or give them away) if/when we leave Abu Dhabi for some other destination, it by now would be a full bookshelf of books, instead of one row.

7. My cell phone (the Brits call them “mobiles”) is a pathetic tiny thing. It cost about $20. It has no apps, it can’t whistle Dixie … I’m sure it cannot do about 1,000 things a “smart phone” can. I prefer my phones dumb, thank you.

8. When I changed jobs, last September, the company issued me a BlackBerry. One of those “smart phones”. Ha. I just now picked it up out of a box where it has been sitting, unused, for six months. I will never use it. Never. I can’t be bothered to learn how. And I do not want to be tethered to the internet wherever I am. I have yet to assess any real advantage for those sad people who sit with a phone in hand, staring at it for hours every day, even while in the company of other people. All it means is people can find you at all times, and bad news gets to you more quickly. (This is the sort of thing an old person says … and it might actually be true.) I recently had the service contract cancelled by the local telcom and plan to return the BlackBerry to the company.

9. The most complicated thing I do with my sad little phone (about the size of a Hostess Twinkie cut lengthwise) is text-message. Not that I like it. I don’t. But in this country, especially, people do not answer calls from numbers they do not recognize. Texting, however, is a less invasive way to reach them, and maybe they will call back. I didn’t want to learn to text, and I find it awkward and burdensome … but I do it. (See, some of us can adapt. A little.)

10. I am typing this on a Compaq Mini. Yes. A laptop. Does anyone have a laptop anymore? Or just a “tablet”? I have two laptops, and I just bought one. This is about as deep into technology as I am likely to get. You realize, as you age, that electronic tools and operating systems are changing so rapidly, they begin to control you — sted the way it ought to be. Fie on them, I say. A pox on them.

And back to Wite-Out. If you didn’t follow the link, it was a white substance you could use to paint out mistakes on type-written paper. After a few seconds it would dry, and they you could type the correct letter into the space where the error had been.

I use a version of Wite-Out to paint over mistakes I make in keeping baseball stats by hand with paper and pen. Making it all a sort of perfectly symmetrical circle of analog technology. I am pretty much fully prepared to confront the 20th century.