That Durn New-Fangled Technology

Well, you haven’t heard from me in a few days. The question is, did you notice? Well, there’s a good reason. This website has a feature where you can upload blog entries and set them to post at a certain date and time. I guess I didn’t do it right, because the last three days didn’t post at all. And now I can’t find them on the site. Nice, huh?

Oh well, at least I remembered to save them on my home computer, so I’ll just manually upload them in the coming days. This way I have some extras on hand for days when I’m too tired or too lazy. What really, really pisses me off is that I work in IT! And I’m a former web designer! So this totally makes me look like an idiot. You would think that there’s no website in the world that would stump me, right? Wrong. In other words, (wait for it…here it comes) I’m getting old. For those of you are as ancient as me, remember back to those days before we had all this technology? Today’s kids have it so much easier than we did back then.

“Rabbit Ears?” What are they, Dad? (I’m just kidding. My kids know what those are. Those are the last resort to watch the Bears game after my wife “forgot” to pay the cable bill.) And what’s a “test pattern?” Hand to God, they actually asked me that once. You mean you had three channels, and that’s all? (OK, I’m exaggerating. In central Illinois, we also had the local PBS station and sometimes WGN from Chicago. There was also a cool independent station out of Indianapolis that you could pull in on a clear night.)

Remember when you cooked food in an oven? No, not a microwave oven, an oven. Yes, that’s how we heated up our leftovers too. A little aluminum foil over the plate, and about 30 minutes at low temperature. Do you think you kids could wait that long? Today’s world is too rush-rush, let’s go, I want it now. Throw it in the nuke box, press a button, then we have to wait a whole 8 minutes before the TV dinner is done. OH…MY…GOD, I’m going to starve!

There was no Internet back then, and no computer in the house. A computer was something that NASA used to get men on the moon, not something you used to chat with your friends and play games. If I didn’t know the answer to something, I would ask my parents. What was their answer? “Look it up.” Luckily, I had a full set of World Book encyclopedias for reference. But if my answer wasn’t there, I had a choice to make. Did I really want to know that badly? Or, egad, what if I needed to know for a school report? Then I had to go to a place that we called “the library.” It was this big building downtown (about an hour’s bike ride each way) and it had thousands and thousands of books in it. In school we learned how to use a “card catalog,” because remember, no computers at the library either. So we had to find books the old fashioned way.

If we wanted to chat with our friends, we had to pick up the telephone. Not the cell phone, and we couldn’t “text” them. We had the regular phone mounted on the wall, with a standard three foot cord that was always tangled up because my stupid sister would wrap it around her finger while she talked to her loser boyfriend for hours on end. No privacy there, unless you got a “privacy phone,” which meant that you had another one in another room that wasn’t the kitchen. Of course, that phone was tied to the wall too, and you couldn’t just get up and walk around with it. I remember the day we got a “touch-tone” telephone; it was like we had moved up from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. No, wait. That would be a better analogy for the day my Mom went from using a hot rock to an electric iron. (Just kidding; she didn’t get the iron until later.)

We didn’t have video games back then, either. We had board games, card games, and games we made up ourselves, but no video games. If you wanted extra bonus points for murdering a police officer, you had to do it in real life because “Grand Theft Auto” didn’t exist yet. Interesting side note: in real life, I don’t recall anyone getting bonus points for shooting a cop or driving up on the sidewalk to mow down innocent bystanders. "Extra time," maybe, but no bonus points.

No, we didn’t have wonderful elaborate fantasy worlds to enter. We had to make do with what we had. We had to take a regular old ball and bat and glove and go outside to play baseball. Imagine what fun we would have had if we could have had the whole neighborhood crammed into a small room with artificial light and simulated a baseball game on the Wii! Instead of having high definition, stereo surround sound war games, we had to “pretend” to shoot aliens or Nazis or Commies. We acted like we were having fun, but I’m sure that deep down we were wishing that we could just control a virtual character with our thumbs instead of running around and getting exercise out in the fresh air and using our “imagination.”

So the $64,000 question is, are we better off with the new-fangled technology?