Published Wednesday, July 28, 2010 1:52 PM
Updated Wednesday, July 28, 2010 1:52 PM
We had gathered for the holidays at my mother’s house in Camden. The kids were not quite in their teens, but already enjoyed overloaded social lives. This was a couple of years before it became federal law that every person in America above the age of three had to have a cell phone surgically implanted in their faces, the better to talk during movies, concerts, and funeral eulogies. But the days of rotary phones were long gone. No one had those.
Except for my mother. She had five of them, kept them until at least the mid to late 1990s. And they confounded the kids to no end. They spent hours trying to figure out how to get them to work, pushing their fingers into the dial holes, sort of like that scene in “Back to the Future” when Michael J. Fox can’t figure out how to open a soda because he’s used to twist off caps. (I know – a pop culture reference no one under the age of 40 will understand. So sue me.)
As always, they get the last laugh. Just when I figure out my cell phone’s texting capabilities – and to this day, I don’t understand why people want to re-invent Pig Latin on their phones – along comes 3G and 4G, whatever that is. I know I personally don’t need to walk, surf the Internet, text and talk to 15 people at the same time. I mean, what are they going to say when they dislodge my surprised, flattened carcass from under a city bus, a smart phone clipped to my belt and a Bluetooth up my nose? Couldn’t I have waited until I got across the street before ordering that calzone?
Worse, the only things that lose their value faster than automobiles and boats are gadgets. Computer, cell phones, music, you name it – the second you shell out the shekels, it’s useless. Obsolete. Worth $500 in the store; worth $5 in the parking lot 10 minutes after you buy it.
I remember my first computer like it was yesterday, or rather, like it was 1997. It was a laptop with a black and white screen and a whompin’ 8 megs of RAM, a veritable NASA engineer’s dream at the time. It retailed for $2,500. I paid a friend at work $500 for it three months after he bought it. Three months after that, I sold it to a school custodian for $50.
I can get one now that not only is exponentially more powerful, it’s exponentially less expensive. If I have to shell out $2,500 on a computer these days, I better be able to create Kelly LeBrock in my living room with it. (I know -- yet another pop culture reference that no one under the age of 40 will get. So sue me.)
It depresses me to no end that James Bond flicks have no more wow factor, at least in the gadgetry department. That’s because there’s nothing – not one cool thing Bond ever had in nearly 50 years of risking STDs for the free world – that any of us can’t pick up at Walmart today, except maybe the Aston-Martin.
When I was a kid, I used to laugh at my dad, poke fun at his irascibility. He steadfastly refused to get with the times. When the craze was those push button digital watches, he kept his old wind up Seiko. When CB radios and radar detectors were the latest shriek, he thumbed his nose at them, noting that as long as he drove that second-hand Dodge Polara – the one with the exact same color scheme as a Brownie Scout uniform -- he would never, ever have to worry about what part of the highway the Smokeys were watching.
Pay for Cable TV? Are you nuts? TV is free and worth every penny of it.
As for remote control, he already had one of those – me.
These days, my middle age rebellion against the modern world starts with the Social Networking thing. Somewhere along the line, something called MySpace came along. I was about to get intrigued when Facebook became all the rage. By the time I got there --and discovered how much I truly dislike it, despite initial ruminations – along came Twitter, which I still steadfastly and cheerfully ignore. The very name just irks me.
I mean, what will they think of next?
The possibilities are endlessly banal.