All I want is to adjust my thermostat. I don’t want to launch a space shuttle; I’m not looking to program a generation of robotic super-soldiers. I just want to take off my scarf and gloves when I get home. And maybe watch a DVD. And make the light on my cell phone stop blinking.

But I can’t do any of this. Why? Because somewhere along the way everything I ever knew about machines — which, to be honest, wasn’t much — became obsolete. I am stuck with a 20th-century brain in a 21st-century world.

My life has become a series of attempts to fix a warp-core drive with a hammer and a crescent wrench.

How I long to turn a dial. Remember dials? On, off, a few numbers. Turn the temperature down when you leave the house; turn it back up when you get home. Operating the thermostat of my new heat pump requires not only the brilliance of Stephen Hawking, but the dexterity of a concert pianist. I’m resigned to long johns.

Heck, give me back my dials and I’ll even get out of my chair to change the volume on the TV. And while I’m up, I’ll happily put a VHS in the VCR, if I had either one. They have, of course, been replaced by DVDs and pay-per-view movies, neither of which I can figure out. I was fine with DVDs under my old entertainment system, but a recent upgrade requires a complicated and — frankly — baffling combination of buttons pushed and switches switched to transition from the TV to the DVD player. Let’s see … is it the AV1, AV2, or TV setting? Do I push “power” or “TV input”? I’m a rat in a maze, and I’m starving.

To make matters worse, I’ve become a cliché. I have to ask my 15-year-old son to help me with practically every technological device in the house. It’s demeaning. Especially since Will does not suffer Neanderthals gladly.

“Honey,” I’ll say, “American Idol is on. Can you help mommy with the TV mode?”

So much sighing ensues it sounds like my son is having an asthma attack. And I swear he changes the directions every time. If he’s planning to live in my basement for the rest of his life his plan is working; without him I’d be sitting in a cold, dark house staring at a scrambled TV and a lifeless cell phone.

Now my car has turned against me. While dropping Will off for driver’s ed instruction, my car locked me out. The doors unlocked when Will and I opened them to change places, but as soon as we shut them to walk around the car — bam! — locked. FYI, if you are going to be locked out of your car, do it somewhere a bunch of teenagers won’t point and laugh as they drive out of the lot.

Finally, for the love of all that’s good, take me back to a time when passwords were for the neighborhood clubhouse (no boys allowed). For my Olympic College classes alone, I have separate username/password combinations for registration, email, the bookstore, on-campus Wi-Fi, library logon, three different providers of online classes, and several research databases. And the rest of my life requires dozens of others.

I’d hope for retinal scanning or a fingerprint reader to save me, but the movies have taught me how horribly wrong that can go. I don’t want anyone cutting off my finger and registering me for calculus.

To sum up, I’m frustrated as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. If this keeps up, I’m going to rethink those super-soldiers.

— Contact Wendy Tweten at wendy@wendytweten.com