(FORTUNE Magazine) – My name is Julie. I am a ... technophobe. And it's going to take more than 12 steps to help me. Fortunately there are others similarly unaddicted, so I don't feel too bad. According to a survey sponsored by Dell Computer, 55% of Americans "are resistant -- even phobic -- when it comes to taking advantage of technology in their everyday lives." The computer industry may think it's | folks like me who are sandbagging office automation. But that's not true, fellow phobes. We're not the problem -- they are! Oh, I know people pushing the new technologies claim to think a lot about ease of use and recite the phrase like a mantra, but the reality is, the computer ain'tthere yet. I also realize I may be a bit more technophobic than most: According to the Yankee Group in Boston, I am one of only 11% of adults in the U.S. who still use a rotary phone at home. But have you ever tried to read the manual that comes with a new computer or a piece of software? Here's a choice tidbit from one I struggle with on the job: "The privileges in parentheses are those assigned to you when the element is opened or prior to modifications. The privileges outside the parentheses are assigned when the element is saved. This means that a message is output when saving, as you no longer have write access to the element once it is saved." Hmm, positively pellucid. Small wonder that Steve Smith, Dell's director of customer service, says the main complaint his group receives from 12,000 to 13,000 telephone callers every day is, How do I make this thing work without having to read about it? We phobes have company in high and unexpected places. GE's CEO Jack Welch doesn't use a personal computer. "I don't need one," he says. "I don't know what I'd do with it." And there's a nasty little rumor floating around the high-tech world that there are senior executives at computer outfits who don't use the machines. John Akers, who used to run IBM, had a PC in his office but was never known to put finger to keyboard (though his successor, Louis Gerstner, has seven of the little buggers in his office and apparently uses them all). Gene Amdahl, father of the fabled IBM System/360 mainframes and founder of Amdahl Corp., the IBM-compatible mainframe company, doesn't use a personal computer either. His problem is the keyboard. "I'm awkward at typing," he says. "I never learned how." Ah, yes, the keyboard. After "documentation," industryspeak for those lucid instructions, the keyboard is the biggest obstacle to ease of use. Ten years ago the social protocol of the workplace held that true executives assiduously avoided anything that smacked of clerical work. Now the machines are begetting $400,000-a-year secretaries. "I was raised in business to give typing and busywork to someone else," says Harold Pearson, executive director of corporate-identity work at consultant Landor Associates, who has just started to use a computer -- and has also just started sharing the services of a secretary. "I feel like I'm going backward." Now the industry may think it has made the keyboard friendlier with the mouse so you can point and click, or is it point and double-click ... or single-click, or ... There are few things that can make a phobe feel more foolish than these mechanical vermin. Their use is not immediately intuitive to those of us who did not grow up on SimCity. Consultant Victor Janulaitis of Positive Support Review in Santa Monica, California, recalls a young woman who was applying for a secretarial position at his firm. When the office manager came in to check her typing test on the computer, she found the girl standing in front of the Mac, moving the mouse back and forth parallel to the screen and wondering if letters were supposed to appear. Then there was the CEO who, in his first computer class, picked up the mouse, held it to his lips, and commanded in Jove-like tones: "Computer, on!" The argot of the trade doesn't help. How come the computer industry and the narcotics industry are the only ones that refer to their customers as users? This is not a term of respect. Randall Fields, CEO of Park City Group, a software company in Utah, notes that "for everything we do in computing, there's a word in the regular vocabulary. Why don't we use it? Why do I have to say ctrl+alt+F1 when what I mean is 'save this and put it away'?" The jargon terrorizes phobes, giving us the feeling that something that worked yesterday isn't going to work today, by God. That infamous word delete has us convinced an errant pinkie on the keyboard will wipe out a year's worth of work, after which the system will crash. The whole thrust of the industry is to take the arcane language of nerds and impose it on the rest of us -- whether we like it or not. This linguistic will to power flies in the face of everything we know about how the relationship between customer and manufacturer is supposed to work. Why should we be forced to accommodate software designers instead of the other way around? One reason is that most of these companies are dominated by people whose prevailing ethos is what Frederick Hoar, president of Silicon Valley's Miller Communications West, calls "rugged geekism." As they hot-rod after ever more improved technology, their attitude is that if you can't work with the program, buddy, that's your problem, 'cause it's state-of-the-art. Randy Fields believes that men and women go into software design because they don't want to be with people. "How many of us nerds do you suppose were voted Most Popular in our high school class?" he asks. The result: a product that makes you feel stupid, frightened, and ultimately angry -- not emotions that otherwise successful business types like to own up to. Alice J. Bradie, a merger consultant to high-tech companies, observes that there's confusion in our minds between the computer -- that is, the box -- and the software. "What people are afraid of is the software," she says, "but they think it's the machine." That's probably why Coleman & Associates, a market research firm in Teaneck, New Jersey, found, when it surveyed 1,001 adults across the U.S., that 41% of those who use computers periodically felt like throwing something at the screen. And that 7% of them actually did. We phobes can't believe the figure is only 7%.

"There's something in the machine that has contempt for you," says Robert Lucky, vice president of applied research at Bellcore, the joint research laboratory of the Baby Bells. "I get the feeling my computer is taking note of every mistake I make and wiring it back to the manufacturer." And if someone like Lucky, a scientist with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, is a little paranoid about his machine, it's not hard to understand why executives, whose adolescent children have to program the family VCR, are reluctant to take on the computer.

THEY FIND IT EASIER to say they don't need it than to say they are afraid of it. A partner at a Wall Street law firm became defensive when asked if he were technophobic, saying, "I don't have to reveal information like that about myself. I don't have any obligation to say I'm lousy at bridge either." Brian McDermott, managing director of Peter Cundill & Associates, a money management firm in Santa Barbara, admits he was afraid of computers after a Mac screen froze on him a couple of times. His fear disappeared when he took a computer course run by Computer Associates of Islandia, New York, but he still says, "I simply have no time to use it." To a large extent, technophobia is a generational issue. Get used to it: "Youth is on the computer side," says Peter Job, the CEO of Reuters. McDermott is 54, Welch is 58, and Gene Amdahl is 71. All of them came of age before personal computing, and all employ people who can generate reams of data for them, so they don't have to do it themselves. The great divide between the phobes and the philes appears to be about age 45, because over 45, you probably didn't type when you were in school, and you certainly didn't grow up with computers. But Victor Janulaitis puts the fault line somewhere between 33 and 36, after which, he says, "people are very reluctant to go into new technologies." And Frank Piluso, the chief technology officer at EMI Records Group, thinks technology is moving so fast that the age is as young as 25. It's possible that technophobia will die out in a generation because the phobes will, and also, let us hope, because thoughtful people in the computer industry will realize they have not yet delivered on the promise of ease of use. Everyone cites the Apple Macintosh for leadership in this area with software that has simple and sort of cute icons you can point to. And Compaq has entered into a Plug & Play partnership with Microsoft and Intel, aimed at making hardware and software easy to set up, easy to configure, and easy to connect with other peripherals. The intelligence to do this will be embedded in the machine where we will all be unaware of it, rather than in an impenetrable set of instructions where it is now.

EVEN SO, the outlook for us phobes is a trifle uncertain. It is very difficult to get an executive job today if you are not computer literate, just as it would be if you couldn't read. Admittedly, Jack Welch doesn't have to start computer lessons, nor do you -- if you have no worries about losing your job. Otherwise, you'd better get with the (software) program. Listen to Frank Piluso, who is 46: "I can't tell you how many people I know -- senior VPs, VPs, directors -- who were laid off six or seven months ago and can't find work. They call me and say, 'What can I do?' I say, 'Retool.' But they're still phobic. You have to retool." So I soldier along with this wretched machine on my desk. And you know something? Moving the mouse is starting to prove kind of weirdly fun, and I've got a CD player buried in this contraption someplace that I've finally figured out how to use. I still maintain that if God had really meant me to become a technological hepcat, She never would have invented fountain pens. Meanwhile, the soothing strains of Dvorak do a lot to keep me from bashing in the screen when it smugly flashes "invalid entry ... invalid entry ... invalid entry..."