There's this giant beast sitting on our dining room table. I'm scared of it. It's this mysterious, black rectangle that opens up like some sort of plastic book, then lights up. Everybody told me I needed one, that I needed to be portable. It whirs and makes fan noises, like some kind of miniature plane winding up for takeoff. I'm frightened that I'm going to drop it. My husband forgot to get the extended warranty plan. I've been known to take baths with phones and Kindles. What's to make me not do that with this contraption?
My career of real estate demands that I keep up with technology, but I always lag just behind the curve, holding my breath and praying that maybe I won't have to figure one more thing out. Alas, progress does not wait for me. I have to navigate past my fear into strange waters. How come children seem to come out of the womb understanding the mysteries of blue light and toggle switches? Toddlers eagerly hop up to the desk, barely able to reach the keyboard, manipulating the mouse like they were born knowing how to operate it. Long gone are the days where the remote on the TV was us, the kids. There were three local channels and absolutely no computers. My husband and his brother even had to run outside and onto the roof to move the TV antennae to change stations. They did this in the space of a commercial and thought nothing of it. Many of today's kids wouldn't know how to climb up on a roof if you paid them.
Years ago, Ken bought me an automatic typewriter that couldn't keep up with my typing speed. I would wait in frustration as the words printed out. Eventually, we bought a home computer. My kids found all sorts of ways to commit mayhem while I was distracted by the thing. The strange tones of the dial-up made me think of demons screeching as they hauled my brain to na-na land. Now they're telling us all to take time to unplug. That, after years of trying to tell us we had to learn how to operate all these machines. Now we're addicted to them and we find out they're giving us ADD and sleep deprivation. We're fatter, unhealthy, less educated and dissatisfied, all because of that blue light calling us away from all the people and books we're supposed to be paying attention to. What would happen if we had a massive EMP attack? (Electromagnetic Pulse Attack). All the machines, electricity, computers, lights, camera, action would cease to operate as we now know them. I think about that a lot. I'm sure there would be massive chaos, lots of starving, rioting and pillaging before people would settle into some semblance of survival. We'd have to go back to the ways things were a hundred or more years ago. Back to the way people have lived for millennia before that (and some still do, in far-flung places). I have no interest in doing that, and I don't know who would be willing to get on the roof (in case they got the TVs running again).
But sometimes I sure would like to unplug a few of these thingamajigs.
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