Computer Crazy?

There was a time in our lives as baby boomers when the most high tech thing we owned or knew how to operate was a touch telephone or a basic Texas Instrument calculator. Boy I remember the first calculator I ever owned was this little hand-held job with red number display. I could have sworn it looked like a Star Trek Tricorder from the 1960’s television show! So cool!

I was simply tech ignorant, but almost all of us were back then. In the 1980’s the big advance for everybody was cable TV. Oh my, how much ESPN and VH1 did I watch! But you see that was all we had really. I didn’t own a PC until about 1992 – those of you who got one of the first I am sure remember that amber screen and DOS. Those first IBM clones cost thousands of dollars, of course. We bought ours used.

I bring all this up because I realized this morning how computer-saturated our lives have become; our cars, home environment systems, televisions and of course these darned cell-phones. I got up to the chiming of my iPhone, answered a text message from a friend and inquiries about my health and well-being over a social network, checked my emails, then grabbed my iPad and picked up where I left off last night reading the latest Walter Moseley e-thriller while making coffee.

Later, I started my 2004 Ford truck and drove in air-conditioned and computer-tuned comfort to Costco, shopped for household items and answered yet another text while in the check-out line. Oh I forgot, the items I purchased were scanned into a hand-held by a store employee. Still later, after I returned home, I tossed a load of laundry into our computerized, LCD-screened washer-dryer units, woke up my new fire-breathing laptop and while waiting for some soup to warm on my electric range (there is a computer in there too), I answered yet another text from my mother-in-law about her iPhone and began to draft this document, which as you are reading it, has been successfully uploaded – with a graphic – to a server that stores this blog page. I do all this in environmentally computer-controlled comfort, where it is a pleasant 76 degrees in my house and a scorching 110 outdoors.

I’m prompted to write this because of a problem today with our cable service. Several channels are not working and this was called to my attention by my mom in law, who has the same service. She called again and asked me if Fox-TV was frozen. I hadn’t been watching television at the time so I fired up that flat-screen and, yes, a whole bunch of stations are frozen in place! Obviously someone is having computer-driven issues and it is affecting all of us today. Well, at least those of us who have Comcast!

As a post-script her television stations were now all available but every station was broadcasting in Spanish. Oops, somebody flipped the wrong computer on!