By and large, most of today’s technology is beyond me. In telling this to Sun City residents, I think I’ve finally reached an audience that understands what I’m saying because I’m a little, how do you say, out of date, perhaps even an outcast with my friends and mostly my teenage and twenty-something nieces and nephews, whose lives are powered Intel.
Bliss for me is a farm house in the country with a corn field growing outside my windows and a rotary phone on my kitchen wall. Maybe I was born 50 years too late—I don’t know.
Sure, I’ve got a handle on email and the Internet (and, of course, the Sun Day is produced on a computer with sophisticated and intelligent programs that I’ve learned to use), but after that, my grasp is fleeting at best.
I have a cell phone (the parasite of the modern man, in my opinion), which was a hand-me-down from my 72-year-old father (how’s that for backwards?) that I have no idea how to work. About a year ago, I dropped it on the ground getting out of my car, and its back casing popped off and its battery fell out. I put it all back together but couldn’t get it to turn on. Thinking it broken, I ran it over to the nearest cell phone store, told the guy behind the desk what happened. He took it from my hand, held a button down, and it magically turned back on. He sent me away with the look of pity usually reserved for hopeless cases. More recently, I was in a cell phone store, thinking I might need to replace my phone. When I told the sales person I’ve never texted, he looked at me with that what-planet-are-you-from expression on his face and was left speechless for a full minute.
I’ve had car trouble for the past six months and, thinking I might need a new car, I bit the bullet and headed into a dealer to take a look around. What I didn’t expect was that I’d have to look around for what you use to start the car nowadays. Apparently keys are archaic. It took me almost ten minutes to realize that all the cars in this particular dealership were push-button operated.
For Christmas, my wife and I bought a new flat-screen TV. No joke, I can barely turn the thing on. It sits/stands/talks (I’m waiting for it to walk) in the corner of my living room, serving mainly as something for me to curse at. And because our first ever Blu-Ray player and TV are both the same brand, their remotes are interchangeable (“compatible,” said the sales person), which means that if I press the POWER button on the Blu-Ray player’s remote (to turn it ON, of course) after the TV is already ON (its screen always telling me NO SIGNAL, despite that my Comcast bill says there’s an expensive one coming in), my TV will turn OFF as my Blu-Ray player turns ON. If I then grab my TV’s remote and press POWER, the TV turns ON and the Blu-Ray player turns OFF, producing a lycanthropic cycle whose effect on me is like the moon’s cycle on a werewolf. How do you watch a movie in my house? Pray. And because the TV is now flat (but is evolving to show 3D), I can’t even call it an idiot box, also because it seems to outsmart me at every turn.
Interchangeable, compatible, unreasonable.
I try to keep an open mind about technology. After all, the wheel is technology, fire is technology. And without a match or lighter, getting a fire to “turn on” is more complicated than powering up your iPhone, which by now can probably start your fireplace in your house if you know what buttons to push and have your fireplace programmed to receive incoming calls.
