By Jane Bokun
I’m one of those older folks who says to myself, I’m not going to let this old age thing beat me.
I’m still going to dye my hair because this new “let your hair go gray thing” is beyond my comprehension. My mother gave us her exact hair dye color for her coffin.
Gray hair screams I’m quitting this rat race. It’s like women who wear the same black polyester pants with a printed polyester shirt every day. What else could you say but, “she quit.”
To keep up with my youthful aspirations, I have not gone gray and I decided to treat my older self and sign up for an invigorating class called Chat GPT Prompts. Even though I earned a journalism degree, I was not a great lover of learning in the ‘80s. I’m also harboring a sneaking suspicion that I have Alzheimer’s Disease because of the ads that are constantly running on television for people in my age group.
I had hope that maybe being old had made me a lover of data and studying, instead of my younger years of skipping class and getting high. Maybe because I’m old, I’m a whole, new person.
That isn’t what happened. The class showed up on Facebook, which seems to really be my crowd, and it was somehow sponsored by Purdue University. My chemical engineer husband went to Purdue and I wanted to let him know how easy it was to attend that university. It was about $1,000 for the class and was worth it to rub my Chat GPT knowledge in my husband’s face. Truthfully, I was rubbing It in everyone’s face just to seem relevant.
I would drop, “I’m taking a Chat GPT class” into any conversation like an attention hungry stepchild. It worked. People were looking at me with respect as if I had said, “So, I just won a Pulitzer.”
Once in the class, which was online (ugh), I felt a sense of invigoration. I can learn new things, I thought. What I didn’t count on was making slides, google slides to be exact. In my whole working life, I’ve never had to make a slide. I never even had to do a PowerPoint. They didn’t even have the Internet when I first started school and only a crude one at work. Slides are a whole new level of hell for me.
There was also a another slide problem for me. I really didn’t want anyone in the class of engineers, computer analysts and scrum masters to know that I didn’t know.
I’ve done all the homework, but I don’t think this class is for me,” said another elderly woman.“
“True dat,” I thought to myself.
I became behinder and behinder in the class and started to worry. Would I actually have to tell the teacher I couldn’t make a slide, but I was getting hundreds in the weekly tests? The class was only five weeks long and was packed with assignments and tests.
“Is this class the Harvard of slide making?” I thought.
Finally, I and the teacher did the slides together. It was still hard for me, but eventually I figured it out.
In the end, it’s not the certificate that matters. It’s not the end of the road, it’s the journey. I landed up learning Chat GPT and it is a help. I get a lot of answers when I Chat GPT Alzheimer’s.
