Technology

              

The other day I was driving home and I received a call from my daughter who was on her way to a sleep over with my husband. "Mom, dad doesn't have the address. What is the address?" I was annoyed. I don't keep addresses in my head. I wasn't in a position where I could access it. "Tell dad to check the white pages." She paused, "What?" I repeated myself, "Tell dad to check the white pages." She became exasperated. "What are you talking about." "Just tell him, he'll know what I mean." I hung up the phone and I realized that my daughter has no idea what the white pages are. I didn't mean the ACTUAL white pages, I meant the online white pages. This isn't 1944. I need to show her how to use them. We don't get phone books any more. Do they still make them? Maybe you only get them if you have a home phone. We've only used our cell phones for years.

Technology has changed so much over the past 10-15 years it's absolutely CRAZY. When I tell my kids about the technology we had when I was a kid, they look at me like I grew up in colonial times. Which is funny, because I am not that old at all. Life is so much easier now, everything is quicker and convenient. It is amazing. Music for instance, you can pull up any song you want online. You can listen to Pandora or any other music app. When we were kids we would listen to the radio for hours, just to make a mixed tape of songs that you like. You would wait for the pause in between songs with your finger on the record button just in case it was a song you like. Sometimes you would miss it and run over to hit the record button. When you listened to it later, it would start 10 seconds in and the DJ would start talking before the end of the song. Haha. If you wanted to listen to a certain song you'd have to fast forward, then play. Nope, not far enough. Fast forward again. Nope, in the middle of the song. Hit rewind and then play again. Damn it! Missed it. Guess I'll just listen to the last minute of this song and the one I wanted to listen to will come on next. How annoying is that. I was so glad when CD's came out. You could actually just go to the song you wanted to listen to. Then they came out with the Discman. That was magical. But not very convenient.
             
When I was in college, I would go work out at the university gym with my discman. I would be on the treadmill and there was no where to put it. So I would hold it but every time I would run fast it would skip. Haha. Sometimes I would burn a CD but it took like 2 days to download songs.

We didn't even have a computer in our house until I was in high school. You couldn't be on the internet and the phone at the same time. Which seems crazy. Computers are the best thing ever. There is no excuse for people to be stupid anymore. You can know anything ALL the time. We saw a bug outside once and we wondered what it was. I pulled out the phone and we looked it up and learned all about it. You can watch math lessons online. My response to everything is "google it." The all mighty google holds all of my answers. Before, you just wouldn't know things. You would be sitting around and thinking, "I wish I could remember that movie where Micheal Douglas was really mad....what was it?" Then you just wouldn't know. You would have to ask people and if they didn't know then you would never find out. My husband has an app on his phone where if a song is playing on the radio, he can record a few seconds of it and it will tell him the name, artist and album. Back in the day, you would hear a song on the radio and not know it and then you would sing it back to everyone you know in hopes that they would know who and what it is so you could buy the album. Life is easy now.

School work for the kids is a lot easier. We had an encyclopedia when I was a kid, or we could go to the library. I remember being in 5th grade and having to do a project on Orangutans and the library didn't have a book on them but there was one at the larger Vineland library. So we had to drive to another city to go to another library and sign up for a new library card to get a book about Orangutans so that I could do this paper. Thank God those days are over because if I had to drive to other cities so my kids could get a book to write a paper - I would be very annoyed. You can just download whole books now without leaving the house. Although driving to the next city wasn't that bad back then because gas was only 80 cents. Even when I was in college I had to spend time a lot of time at the library. When we did research papers we could only have 1 internet source. A lot of the academic journals were not hosted online and I had to request them and it would take forever. Then we had to save them on a disk and turn them in. I feel bad for people in college during the type writer days. Could you imagine writing a thesis on a type writer? I would have just dropped out of school.

Shopping is a lot more convenient now. I have embraced online shopping, it is the best thing ever. All of my Christmas shopping is done online. I am in pajamas, pick out all my stuff, click the button and it's right on my doorstep. It doesn't get much more convenient than that.

Before you always had to have cash because a lot of places didn't take debit or credit cards. I remember being excited when fast food restaurants started taking debit cards. Sometimes, I am at places that don't take cards and I get so annoyed. Just yesterday I was at a parking garage that only accepted cash or check. Really? Who carries cash anymore. I wrote them a $3.00 check. Get it together parking garage.

When we first got married there was no online bill pay so once I month I would sit at the table and write out checks to the electric company, phone company, insurance, and for the car loan. I would stuff them in envelopes and wait for the checks to clear. I wasted 20 minutes of my life each week doing that.

We used to be tied to the television. If you missed a show. You just missed it. You would have to check the TV guide in the newspaper to see if there would be a re-run. Now we can watch any show and any movie pretty much ever made in a matter of minutes. We control our own time. It is fabulous.

I wonder what life will be like for my grand kids. They will probably think the technology that we have now is crap. They will probably transport places and have their banking information embedded in their fingertips. Then my kids will tell them about their ancient iphones and the simpler life that they had growing up in the 2010's. It will be fascinating. I think they should be able to sure cancer by them or created a pill that let's you eat whatever you want and still be thin, and something that let's your skin not age, and a machine where you can press a button and amazing dinners come out of it. The technology Gods need to start working on that.