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Here
I am sitting in the airport the other day looking around at all of the folks to
see what the latest items in gadgetry happen to be. The newest cell phone fad
seems to be a device that you insert into your ear and it connects wirelessly
to your cell phone…so the impression you get is that of someone actually talking
to you. If you happen to be on the side where you can't see the ear thing, then
you have a tendency to answer the questions that are being asked or to make a
comment on the conversation that doesn't concern you. You can't always tell if
they are talking to you or not until the person says something like…"I love you
too" then you can be fairly certain that they weren't talking directly to you….
on the other hand I'll leave that up to you to decide if you want to move away
or not. This is strictly your decision.
But, think back to a few years
ago, before everyone was 'wired'. First off, all of us had telephones which had
a "CORD" attached to them. Horrors!!! This tended to make travel throughout your
house somewhat difficult. Talking on your phone in traffic was out of the question,
unless you had a really long cord. Big change in this area. Not so sure we made
any progress, though.
How about your television? I'll bet some of you
can actually remember the time you had to get out of your chair to change the
channel. Not to mention how often you had to get up and move those 'rabbit ears'
around for better picture quality. When was the last time you had to adjust the
horizontal or vertical controls? Do you even know what those are?
You want
culture shock? When was the last time your kids manually rolled up the windows
in a car? Most kids today have never seen anything but the button they push to
make them go up or down. Same goes for car mirrors. Used to have to get out of
the car, adjust the mirror, get back in the car, see if it's set correctly, get
back out and repeat until you got it right. Boring.
My oldest son and
his wife just had a baby. I remember using a ceramic warmer thing to heat bottles
up with about 2am…now they just toss a sack of formula or milk into the microwave
and bingo, there it is. . No fuss, no mess. They don't even use bottles like we
had years ago; the ones today are tilted with all kinds of nipples and air bags
inside. I think my daughter in law would have a heart attack if I poured milk
in a coke bottle, put a nipple on it and stuck it in the baby's mouth. Tell the
kids today about that…. they don't believe you. Makes you wonder what they used
in the middle ages.
Some things are just better off left alone. They simply
can't be improved upon. Take for instance an electric cheese grater. I bought
one last year. It's a dud. You can grate 10 times more cheese, faster using the
old metal hand graters that everyone has had in their kitchens for about a hundred
years. When you think about it…grating cheese in a machine makes about as much
sense as using an electric rolling pin. Or an electric pencil.
You want
to know how out of touch some folks are? Just pull out a sheet of carbon paper.
At church a couple of weeks ago, I saw a couple of kids in front of me pull some
out of the little attendance register and look at it as if it was a moon rock
or something. I don't think they had a clue as to what it was for until their
mother bent over and explained it to them.
As a result we've become addicted
to electronics. Heaven help us if the power grid goes out. We might have to learn
how to light the fire using a real match instead of one of those little plastic
lighters. The rate of heart attacks would rise to epidemic proportions if we had
to actually use an axe to cut wood instead of a chainsaw. We pay good money to
go to a gym to work out then pay more money for a car with power steering and
power brakes to drive there and back.
No wonder the aliens from outer
space leave us alone…they probably have looked us over and can't begin to figure
us out. Does it make sense to you? |
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