I would like to say before I begin that, under normal conditions, I am both a very reluctant and then, when finally pushed to it by extremely adverse circumstances, discreet crier. A quick burst of tears in a bedroom or loo, then I hit myself in the head to get me to shut up and emerge, refreshed and ready to face the world again.

This week, however, normal conditions have not prevailed. For I am having to buy a new mobile phone. It sounds like such a small thing, does it not? Eight-year-old phone dies at last – you go out and buy a new one.

Except that I have, through no fault of my own, reached a point in my life at which I now need one of those fancy-dan mobile phones that lets you type stuff into it and do the internet while on the move. And so I have to buy an iPhone or a BlackBerry or possibly something called a PalmPre, which may be different again or which may be a subset of one of the two previously mentioned. I don't know, they all look like shiny black devilboxes to me...

Anyway, this is why I have started crying in shops.

I could carry on with a simple phone – and if it were just up to me, I would – but I am increasingly gumming up the works for other people by being sometimes inaccessible via email. I know, 'tis all a madness. We shouldn't live like this, but we do, we are and we will continue to do so until civilisation ultimately implodes. Only then will we all be able to sit around again, happily poking at dust bunnies with bits of stick while our exhausted brains deliquesce, slip gently out of our ears and drip slowly off our shoulders on to the ground. Then we can mix them into the dust with more bits of stick by way of jolly variation on a theme. But until such a time, I cannot be the one responsible for spragging up other people's schedules and causing their already ridiculously stressful days to bulge ever more threateningly at the seams.

So fancy-dan it is. And herein lies the main problem: I don't understand anything anyone says to me about technology. I am not prejudiced, I am not being deliberately resistant – I try and try to understand, but I have quite simply missed the boat. The world has outpaced me. There are gaps in my comprehension apparently too wide for anyone, however willing (and the average unit-shifter in the average phone retail emporium is actually not noticeably so), to bridge.

I suspected that something might have gone terribly wrong somewhere a few months back, when The Daily Show started mocking an aged US senator for describing the internet as "a series of tubes", prompting me to crystallise my own internal vision of the wondrous web.

I actually think of it as, well, do you remember Fraggle Rock – it was a sort of subterranean Muppet Show – and the Doozers, who built lots of towers and flyovers and underpasses out of those translucent white plastic sticks? That's how I conceptualise the internet – a giant underground structure made up of millions of little sticks by tiny green workers scurrying to lay the next connection ahead of the next mouse click.

So now I cry in front of people who try to explain to me, a woman with Doozers frolicking in her head, about networks, touch screens, apps (not short for Apple, it turns out), unlimited data tariffs, peer-to-peer file-sharing and so, endlessly, on. But their unspoken message is that the world has outpaced me, and that, as a result, from now on life will be a ceaseless struggle to maintain my fingertip hold on its rushing coat-tails.

I think I shall just close my tear-filled eyes and let the Doozers dance.