Frustration, thy name is technology.
I remember being a boy and hearing my elders talk about how different life was when they were young. How they had to walk ten miles uphill to school barefoot in the snow… both ways. I also remember telling myself I would never stoop to such a low level. I would never lament the present for a simpler time.
Screw that.
I was trying to scan some documents on my handy, dandy printer/ fax/ scanner/ dish washer. To say the least, there was an electronic spanner in the works. After the steam coming out my ears abated, I remembered a far away simpler time when:
- Broken cars could be completely FUBARed in the back yard,
- You could only walk a small distance when you were on the phone before being slingshot back against the kitchen wall,
- Movies were seen in theatres with buckets of fart generating popcorn,
- Dating happened in bars, coffee shops and brothels… not in bits and bytes,
- There were only eight channels to watch… if the antenna was pointed correctly,
- Playing games meant getting together with other carbon units, pulling out a box with a board, dice, a bunch of oddly shaped plastic pieces and cursing at each other over beer,
- Mailing something included licking a stamp, spitting out the glue and walking to a post box,
- My car didn’t talk to me, I talked to it,
- A PDA was a notepad and a pencil
- If no-one was home, you didn’t have eight other ways to find them,
- Handwriting was an art and calculators were a luxury
- A virus was a physical threat
- A cougar was an animal, not a middle aged woman
- Social networking was done in a pub, sports arena or at friends houses
- Tweet and Twitter were bird noises
- Air conditioning was opening the car window or letting loose a good fart… or both
- Windows were holes in exterior walls not frustrating pieces of #%&**#@$
- Blackberries were edible and didn’t ring
There’s plenty more for me to grouse about. The newer generation doesn’t know how easy it is for them just like I didn’t know how easy I had it compared to my parents and grandparents. Damn! I’ve become them!
On the other hand, I get to write my disobedient tripe and have it potentially read by up to ten or twleve really jaded homo-sapiens. Maybe technology isn’t all that bad.
P.S. Smacking the crap out of sensitive electrical equipment is not a positive. Anyone have a spare roll of duct tape?
