Take your technology and shove it

To say that I have fallen a little bit behind in the world of today’s technology would be an understatement.

About a dozen years ago, I was on the cutting edge of technological advances. I was the guy a lot of other folks came to for answers to pesky technical issues. I could write computer programming, fix desktop systems, I could even program my own VCR. I just never figured out my watch.

I once wrote a program for older computers (older now, fairly new then) that would install itself at boot up and then force the keyboard operator to tell the machine it loved it before it would allow them to move on to something productive.

I guess technically you could call that a virus, but that was back when viruses were practical jokes and did no harm to machinery or data.

Then, I decided I could no longer afford to keep up with technology, so remained mired in the after market.

And I liked it there.

Our oldest son educated himself into a computer geek, and our oldest daughter married a computer geek. I had plenty of ready-made sources for technological advice on computers.

Our second-oldest daughter has long been the re-programmer of my watch, and our youngest daughter has for the last few years been the educator for any new cell phones we may have purchased.

And I didn’t mind that at all.

Then, Holly forced me into a newer technology with my latest cell phone.

It’s one of those phones that allows calls, texts, and will send and receive emails. It will also check the weather for me, tell me where I am, and find out where I should go, although to the chagrin of my detractors it will not show me the shortest route to Hades.

Now, it seems as though everyone thinks I am instantly available at any time, by any means.

Wrong.

I still don’t hear as well as I did in my younger days. Living underneath a flight deck for months on end can screw with one’s hearing, and listening to and performing really loud rock-n-roll music can finish the job.

So I don’t always hear the phone ring.

Then they’ll try the text message route. I don’t have any sounds on that one yet, but the phone will vibrate when one comes through, so if the phone is on my hip or in my hand, or lying on a hard surface where it can dance to the vibration, I can get the message fairly rapidly.

Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until I pick the thing up and check messages.

If I don’t respond right away to text messages, after I haven’t picked up the phone, I’ll get an email asking me why I didn’t do either.

I don’t check email while driving, and if I’m sitting in front of a computer, I use the real thing.

But I think the thing I dislike the most about this new phone is that it tells me where I am and how to get from there to anywhere.

Now you may think this a little weird, but I actually enjoy getting lost sometimes, and I’m not one who frowns on asking directions.

Once I got lost in deep Eastern Kentucky when I lived and worked there and I wound up on a small mountaintop with a beautiful post-strip mine lake surrounded by new growths of pine trees.

Not to let a good thing go to waste, Mother Nature (maybe with some help from local folks) had stocked the lake with fish.

I didn’t care where I was, or how to get out of there. I spent a lazy afternoon just feeding the fish my leftover hamburger bun. I balled part of it into a ball and tossed it in the lake. Because the lake wasn’t near any man-made pollution source, the water was rain-pure clear.

I watched the fish play football with that dough ball for nearly 20 minutes until the biggest fish in the lake swam up and swallowed it in one gulp.

I even kept score.

If I had a phone back then that received calls, texts, emails and had told me how to get off that mountain top, I would have missed that experience.

I finally found my own way down. I found a cute little country store, a bootlegger’s cabin and some beautiful scenery on the way out. I made use of all three again.

Now, I have to put up with something like this on a regular basis.

A text comes across the phone. My butt starts buzzing. I pick up the phone to read the text and the phone rings. My hand starts buzzing. I answer the phone and an email comes through. My ear starts buzzing.

The caller wants me to look at my email and answer. The texter wants me to call him on the phone. The email is asking me to use the navigator and find out how to get from somewhere to somewhere else and text the directions back.

Yeah right.

Oh and there’s one other thing.

I need to find the designers of these particular creations of the devil and slap them upside the head with my left hand.

It appears that most phones are made for right-handed people. My right ear is terrible, I can barely hear anything on that side, ergo, I use my phone with my left hand.

Or maybe I use it with my left hand because for many years I drove a stick and needed my right hand free.

Whatever the reason, the phone is very easy to use right handed, very difficult to use left handed. The text keyboard, which is a virtual keyboard (what happened to buttons?), almost requires me to hit the little rectangles with my right hand or it won’t read properly.

I’m ambidextrous. I don’t care which hand I use, but I care which ear I use, and I choose to use the left ear, thus the left hand.

Unless I want to put my forearm across my face and use my right-handed phone in my left ear.

Technology to make my life easier? Yeah right.

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