From the Porch; Technology No No’s

No, no I am not saying this outhouse is a technological advancement. What I am saying is this is how a lot of us retirees see technology. Mistakenly we want to keep the old way of doing things. I remember sending a letter to a friend. It would take 3 days to get there. You always had to give them a day or two to answer and of course 3 days for the return letter to get back to me. Technology gave us texting and instant messaging. Yet there are still some of us old geezers out there who do not or will not use the internet. They still want to write and send a letter the old fashion way, using snail mail. There is a reason they call it snail mail.  

Not to long ago I was watching the DVD of Deadwood, that HBO mini series. One of the first things you notice is that everybody was talking funny. Oh they are using the same words we use today but they are using them in ways we normally would not. When you first hear the actors talking that way you think that the writers of the series must have went nuts with the thesaurus. Nobody talks that way. Well you are right about that, nobody does talk that way, today. However 75 or 80 years ago they did. This means, that in the span of one person’s life, the English language has changed. As one who is a lot closer to that 75 year mark than some of you I will say that I was able to understand what the actors on Deadwood were talking about; but I had to listen real close and pay close attention.

The reason I tell you this is because our children, or more to the point our grandchildren are the ones running most of the technology we have today. They really do not make the HELP section of any program impossible to understand on purpose, like those actors on Deadwood they just talk funny. The problem is that we don’t have an up to date, computerize thesaurus to understand what they are trying to get us to understand. These young-ins simply do things differently than we old folks do. That is because they not only think differently than we do; these young whippersnappers assume different things than we do. When our grandparents had to use the facilities they put on their boots, coat, hat, and grabbed a stick to beat away the varmints. Move them ahead into our generation and think how strange it would sound if we told them that the facilities were up stairs, first door on the left when they asked us where the little house was. That just wouldn’t make sense to them. We would not think to tell them that the crapper was in the house because to us that is where the crapper has always been. That’s why the HELP section can seem so strange to someone who did not grow up with computers. The kids that write those HELP segments assume you know stuff because that is the way it always has been, to them.

Nobody is saying this learning thing is going to be easy but if you are one of us old geezers and are not keeping up with technology, shame on you. If and when everybody around you is younger and more knowledgeable than you, there is no way you will be able to relate to them or understand what he or she is saying. It is called, self imposed isolation. I think it is also one of the reasons that so many of us wind up in a home. We couldn’t keep up so we give up.

So the next time you want to do something that you thing that technology might have improved, ask yourself why are you still doing it the old fashion way. Then do whatever it takes to learn how to do it better, faster, and easier. One of my first technology improvements came when I was reading a newspaper. I learned about news web sites and which ones are for which subject. I found that I could find any news I wanted faster and in more detail on the internet than I ever could from the newspaper. Don’t get me wrong, I still get the Sunday paper delivered to our front door. I tell myself it is because of the ads but I can get those faster and more plentiful on the internet too. Maybe I still get the paper for old time sake. After all, old guy that I am I still write my name in the snow every now and then. Of course for me I do my writing in the sand since I live in Florida. Thank God my name only has 2 letters.