"Hey, are you gonna confirm me as a friend or not?" The question, coming from my supervisor, caught me off guard. I jumped up from my chair, dropped my patient assignments, and flung my arms around Danny, giving him a hug.

I turned him toward the room of astounded therapists and announced, "I hereby decree that Danny is my friend. There," I said and grinned at him, "how was that?"

"You're an idiot," my supervisor laughed. "You don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Sure I do," I said uncertainly. "You are having a bad day, and you need a friend."

"Nah, Facebook, dude," Danny corrected me. "I'm talking about Facebook."

"Oh," I said, but without comprehension.

I will admit that the whole Information Age is baffling to me. So far I've downloaded more viruses than restaurant listings. I still buy stamps, for goodness sake. Not long ago, while enjoying a midnight meal in the cafeteria with my fellow therapists, I looked down the table and saw Danny peering at his phone.

"Rats," he exclaimed, "I just got spammed!"

I flung myself out of my chair and grabbed a handful of lime Jell-O, crouching low and surveying the startled diners.

"What are you doing now?" he asked.

"You said you got spammed," I explained, as I juggled the quivering Jell-O and looked for a target. "I thought a food fight was about to break out."

"Totally different spam," Danny said, punching a few buttons and frowning. "Spam," he said, turning the phone toward me. All I could see was a jumble of words and numbers.

"You say it like it's something bad," I said. "Spam is delicious. I have 10 cans of it."

"You're beyond help," Danny said, shaking his head. "What's in that stuff anyway?"

"No one knows," I answered.

I can live with being the most technologically challenged among my co-workers and the butt of endless department jokes, but at home it's another matter. I'm completely in the dark when my daughter texts me with "lmao" and and the occasional "brb." So before starting rounds, I bounded upstairs to the peds floor to visit the Oracle, a 12-year-old kid with cystic fibrosis whose laptop never leaves his side.

"OK, let's look at your Facebook page," the Oracle told me. In less time than it takes to open up a can of Spam - the real stuff - the Oracle had a blue and white screen up with my name and picture on it.

"Hey," I cried, "I'm on the internet. Wow."

"Big wow," the Oracle yawned, "everybody's on the internet. Look right here; you have dozens of requests. People want you to 'friend' them. All you have to do is accept." He clicked on one or two. "Viola. I've doubled your amount of friends. Now you are up to four."

"So, it's like a game, but instead of shooting down aliens, you capture friends?" I asked. "Do you get points for it?"

"You are hopeless," the Oracle pronounced. He picked up his phone and swiped a finger across the screen. "You are aware," he added, "that you can even confirm friends from a phone that gets the internet?"

I thought it best to just nod and smile knowingly. Besides, if I hung around his room too long, some passing therapist might just "friend" me into helping do his CPT.

Somewhere around the sixth floor, a nurse summoned me to the front desk and held out a familiar looking phone. "Your supervisor left this up here," she explained. "I'm sure he's looking all over for it. I know I'd get a little crazy if I lost mine; it's my connection to the world."

I thought about that as I studied the phone's really nice screen. "Hey," I asked the nurse, "does this thing get internet connection?"

By the time I finished rounds, hit the candy machine for some red licorice, and made my way back to the break room, there was some kind of turmoil occurring. The overhead lights dimmed, blinked, and then slowly brightened as the hospital's huge generators kicked in. Computers beeped, phones squawked, and our faithful printer burped out test sheets and nonsense.

"What's going on?" I asked as Danny raced by and patted his pockets for something.

"Someone used a cell phone to friend half the world's population and shut down the entire system," Danny growled. "They're looking for the culprit right now."

"Gosh," I said as I quietly slipped my supervisor's phone into the pocket of his lab coat that was hanging over a chair. "I wonder what dummy did that?"