I have a love/hate relationship with technology. Sometimes I long for the days of my childhood when the big technological advancement of the day was the eight-track tape player. The great thing about the eight-track tape player was that it was pretty simple to figure out how to use it. There was a big hole in the side of the player and you simply slid the eight-track into the hole and, voila, music started playing.
Nowadays, they have something called an MP-3 player. These don’t come with big holes, nor do they come with cartridges to shove into big holes. Therefore, I don’t know how to use one and never will.
Phones were also very simple back in the old days (1974). I can still remember when every family had one phone … a black rotary phone that hung on the kitchen wall. That was all anyone needed. There were no answering machines, cell phones, ring tones, etc. If you were home and the phone rang you answered it.
Okay, if you were on a party line, you listened to make sure it was one long ring as opposed to your neighbor’s two short rings before you picked up. The last good advance in phone technology is when they did away with the “party” line, because quite frankly, having some stranger listen in on your conversations wasn’t really all that much of a party.
However, advances with phone technology started to spiral out of control with the invention of the touch-tone phone. Once people became too impatient to wait for the rotor to spin back on their phone, it was only a matter of time before they would want to carry their phones around in their pockets.
Now things are completely out of control. For example, I was standing in front of a urinal in a public restroom last week when my pants started “mooing.” (My oldest daughter downloaded a cow mooing for my ring tone.) I was right in the middle of my business, so I decided to ignore it. Unfortunately, if I don’t answer my phone pretty quickly, the cow turns hostile. My cute little cow starts to sound like a bull.
I was beginning to worry that someone might walk in and hear the commotion coming from my trousers when all of the sudden I heard laughter coming from one of the stalls.
Now, my only goal became to get out of there before the faceless stall dweller emerged to check out the guy whose pants sounded like they contained an angry herd of cattle. This would have never happened in 1974.
The phone was a gift from my wife and it probably cost the same price that the United States paid for Louisiana. The phone not only moos, but it has all kinds of features that I will never ever use. It can hook to the Internet, to satellites, you can shop with it, and I think it will even baby-sit the kids for you. I use it mainly to talk to people that I don’t really want to talk to in the first place, and to make my friends laugh because it moos. I’d be better off simply carrying around one of those wind-up monkeys that clap the cymbals.
I’ll tell you another area where technology has gone completely overboard … computer games. Back in the good old days, if you were really good all year long and your father received a Christmas bonus, you might get really lucky and end up with an Atari game system. What I liked about Atari was that they kept their game system simple and easy to use.
The Atari game system I had as a kid, offered two games and that was it. The games were “Pong,” and some sort of shooting game in which you basically pointed a big plastic handgun at your TV and killed stuff. Of course “Pong” was the real reason kids back in the 70s went crazy for the Atari. The thrill of using your electronic paddle to hit an electronic ball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until your eyes literally started leaking blood was the biggest breakthrough in the world of children’s entertainment since the invention of Silly Putty.
Today, kids wouldn’t appreciate the simple pleasure of “Pong.” No, nowadays, kids aren’t happy unless their game includes at least a half dozen two-headed mutant aliens wearing fedoras and packing grenade launchers.
Playstations, X-boxes, Game Cubes, and now something called a Wii, have all replaced the good old-fashioned Atari game system. But that is just the beginning. Personal DVD players, satellite television, e-mail, laptops, digital cameras, blue-tooth, BlackBerrys and electricity have replaced all the good, decent things in life such as paper, pencils, books, candles and cave drawings.
Sure, I realize that I may sound like the second coming of the Unabomber; however, I miss the good old days when you had to get off your butt to change the channel. Movies were viewed on Saturday nights in large theaters. People called you back if they really wanted to talk to you, and best of all, your pants never ever mooed.
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