It pains me whenever my wife goes out and buys any type of new electronic device. This is because she, being probably the most electronically-challenged person on the planet, will be totally dependent on me to figure out how the thing works.

For instance, a few years ago she got a portable DVD player as a Christmas present. My wife has a bit of a streak of independence, so, as she is usually wont to do, she struggled on her own for a whole afternoon trying to figure out how to get the thing to work. Afterwards, she turned to me in despair. I looked at the player for a few seconds and flicked a switch on the side. The device immediately came to life and began playing the disc that was loaded into it. “See this right here,” I showed her. “That’s the ‘on’ button”

“Oh”, she replied, “I didn’t get that part.”

I bring this up because last week she came home with a new contraption to totrure herself with- a small digital camera. This time, however, she had no delusions of being able to figure out how to operate this one on her own.

So I whipped out the quick start guide, showed her the basic controls, being careful to point out the location of the “on” button, and off she went merrily snapping shots of just about everything that even vaguely captured her interest, even down to the stack of last week’s newspapers.

Then, it came time to upload the newly taken images onto the computer, a task which, to her at least, was as daunting as finding proof for the Unified Field Theory.

I showed her the few basic steps for this, which pretty much amounted to drag-and-drop, and off I went to my own business of watching classic episodes of the Hooters Annual Bikini Contest on hulu.com on my own laptop.

I had barely gotten through the opening credits before I herd her call from the other room. “The picture of my ring came out blurry!” she lamented. “Help me!”

Getting a good, sharp picture of such a small object I knew would be somewhat of a challenge with this particular camera. After all, this type of camera was not the equipment of, say, a crime scene investigator. Still, I knew I had to at least make an attempt at solving this problem, and to do this i needed to go beyong the Quick Start guide and into the User’s Manual.

The CD that came with the camera contained versions of the manual in quite a few languages, including some that I’m sure have been dead for centuries. Fortunately, English was one of these- surprising given that it’s the official tongue of the country of purchase. However, I was grieved to discover that the manual for this puny little camera seemed to have more pages than a bill being debated in Congress.

This manual I’m sure covers how to take just about any kind of picture imaginable, that is, except how to photograph small objects so they don’t come out all washed out and blurry.

So, I, the Great Tech Whiz-kid of the house, (by default since no one under the age of fifteen lives with us) was stumped on that particular question.

This did not stop her, however, and about every five minutes or so for the rest of the evening I had to answer one after another desperate plea for help. By the time I was done, I was qualified to tech a college-level course on how to operate this particular model of camera.

I still don’t know how to take a picture of something that remotely resembles my wife’s ring, but someday I will. I have to; I don’t think I’ll get through a single episode of the Hooters’ Bikini Contest until I do.