Okay! Here I am, like Constanze Mozart, making an embarassing confession. I must be one among the last people
in the US to switch to a smartphone. On a trip to Atlanta to see a stellar
grand-girl graduate High School, I was overwhelmed by family, both kids and
grandkids, demanding that I get a "better" phone. So—I caved at last, regaled
with all the storied delights that awaited me once I owned such a device.
I
returned home with said smartphone tucked inside a pair of socks. We had been too
busy with visiting back and forth from one side of Atlanta to the other and hanging out, or attending various
graduation festivities to go searching for a case through the always mind-boggling traffic. I'd figured this would be a good
time to make the big change, as there I’d have two sons, two DILs and a grand girl to
instruct me in at least some of the Major Arcana.
I was once considered a tech savvy person, but those days
are loooong gone. There’s a certain
Luddite pride in still using a genuine IBM keyboard from the 80’s, hitched
to 2004's computer. It is, however, getting to be more difficult to
lag behind than to “get with the program,” as software (and hardware too) endlessly
morph. IMHO, (as I learned to say on AIM) I suspect that all the “updating” is
simply an excuse to wring more $$ from us hapless consumers.
One of my friends has a terrific notion about a kind heart software firm (!) who would build MS65, a program guaranteed to run without chronic
episodes of illogic/insanity (could I perhaps be alluding to MS 10??) and not
to change or alter in any way for a decade. That’s about the right amount of
time for many of us less sophisticated cotton-tops to learn new software.
I’m under no illusions, though, I’ll soon be scrapped and
dissembled for the metal value of my components, along with my beloved Wang PC which still crouches sadly in the back of a closet. Stability is not what software developers are
into these days—the more things fail to work properly, I guess, the better it
is for IT, or something. Anyway, while I’m griping, what’s with the penchant
for hiding the most commonly used operations three or four—or five--pull downs deep?
Is it so we have to humiliate ourselves and buy the latest copy of “…For
Dummies”? And what’s with that “Search” that leads you into Alice in Wonderland
conversations with "Cortana." (And, hell, I'm not fooled. It's just that g-d paperclip tarted up and back in our faces again. Couldn’t "search" have just searched, as the word indicates that it does?
This morning, I awoke to the sound of chimes—my new phone,
of course. I’d set the alarm, hitched it to the wall socket and left it wakeful.
Now, I leapt out of bed, and attempted to turn the alarm off without first
putting on my glasses. Next thing I knew, I’d taken four blurry pictures of
myself--nothing you want to keep, especially those taken first thing in the morning. It took a few minutes before I managed to figure out how to put the
camera back to sleep and delete the alarm.
How did I, whose first and foremost mental image of “phone”
remains the graceful black candlestick apparatus in my grandparent’s living room, enter
a world where a small slim box in my hand can deposit checks, take pictures,
tell time, and connect me to the internet and thence conduct me into untold wonders of
consumption?
~~Juliet Waldron, who just keeps getting older...
