w~~_7.JPG "pjcdn2005"){kind=avatar}
zW2Ig~~60_7.JPG "brandeentertainment"){kind=avatar}
When I bought my Blackberry, I thought about the 30-year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures and communicates with Facebook and Twitter. I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, my 13 grand kids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.
My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.
The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it's red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife and everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. I had to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.
I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside that gadget was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, "Re-calc-u-lating." You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then if I made a right turn instead. Well, it was not a good relationship...
When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.
To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven't figured out how I lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions, checking bathrooms, and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.
The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden "Paper or Plastic?" every time I check out just knocks me for a loop. I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused, but I never remember to take them with me.
Now I toss it back to them. When they ask me, "Paper or plastic?" I just say, "Doesn't matter to me. I am bi-sacksual." Then it's their turn to stare at me with a blank look. I was recently asked if I tweet. I answered, No, but I do fart a lot."
P.S. I know some of you are not over 60. I figured your sense of humor could handle it....
We senior citizens don't need anymore gadgets. The TV remote and the garage door remote are about all we can handle.
I haven’t reached the point yet but I don’t like this new world of time saving devices that seem to take more time away.
Facebook (or what I call Faceplant)….My niece got me on to it about 4 years ago. Because I was on her ‘friends’ list I was soooooo lucky to attract new ‘friends’!!! I didn’t want to know these people and they certainly weren’t ‘’friends’’ and based on what they talked about I didn’t want them as ‘friends’. My niece (28) said they thought it was ‘cool’ an uncle with long hair, beard, tattoos and Harleys. These ‘friends’ to me were at best ‘acquaintances’ on the rim of the universe along the edge of the black hole of infinity. I wasn’t interested in if their kid lost is first tooth, or just got out of diapers, or how many ‘stamping’ hobbies they had, or that they bought a new garden hose at Wallymart, or the endless long lists of what they were doing in life by the minute or where they were going and I definitely didn’t want any of them dropping over to say “hi”.
‘Friends’ is a word used to loosely in my view. Friends are people you have known for a longgggg time, people who have proven their trust and reliability, people who you can call at 2am and their there at 2:01, people who will help you bury the body, people who you have shared sorrow with and laugher with and even anger and come out on the other side….still friends. Neither can you really, really achieve that on a computer…..real life is the only true test. I think the younger generation are getting too wrapped up in a word they do not have a real definition for and they’re going to be very disappointed.
So now I’m on Faceplant and I start getting up-dated emails and they come in like a tsunami and my email beeper on my computer makes it sound like my computer is going into cardiac arrest. After about a week of that I cancelled my account and I’m was out of Faceplant with a sigh of peace and tranquility.
Like Pierre and others I’m not a big fan of technology. Oh I’ve tried but it just isn’t me anymore than trying to grasp the multitude of cooking ideas that take up so much time and money. I’m a basic kind of guy.
I have a TV, DVD, Blue Ray, stereo, equipment with more black control boxes than I think any human being should be forced to have. Then one of the dogs jumps up on the couch and sits on one of the boxes and I lose everything! This is followed by an SOS call to the wife who for some unknown reason has a mind that is plugged into modern technology and ………she fixes it.
Cell phones, well I have one that all I want is to make a call and get a call…if absolutely necessary. I don’t want to play games on it, or have the internet, or talk to Saturn. When I hit the wrong button and suddenly I’m in never-never land……I just toss it to someone else and say “fix this ^#!!*# thing!! Some people have started to call me Gibbs who I guess is a character on a TV show called NCIS and we seem to be a lot alike. Give me a piece of steel or a piece of wood and some old tools and I’m a happy camper. Give me a piece of technology with a 100 or more buttons and a million circuits and you need a dictionary to understand the language and I’m a bear who is not having a good day!
Twitter…..as far as I am concerned it’s for people with little life and what they have…they want everyone to know about. I can only hope it’s a passing fad.
GPS….finally broke down and got one last year only because of customers who live either on new streets that aren’t on maps or out in the middle of nowhere. But, I use it as little as possible. That woman in the little black box……believe me, we have had ‘words’! I don’t need to be told every 10ft how close I am coming to a turn!! I do at times make a wrong turn just to tick her off and then she has to ‘recalculate”. There is something gratifying in messing with her circuits.
Life was simple and then someone came up with all these new gizmos and gadgets that they say we ‘must have’ and guess what………life isn’t simple anymore.
but again i an extremely Anti technology so I might not be the best to comment ..
I always find it interesting when out here in the country.........the hydro goes off. It's especially poignant when it's at night. Suddenly, the silence is there. Real silence. Deafening silence. No sounds that we are so use to having around us. I like the silence of the forest and cemeteries. Technology not required.
What would today's generation do if the electronics all stopped working
Laugh a frightened laugh and then in a while......PANIC!!
Featured Posts
