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Old dogs, new tricks
Near the end of their lives, my parents struggled with technology. Dad felt his career disappeared when engineering and design firms switched to CAD systems. Although I’m sure Dad’s drawings were as accurate and far more beautiful than computer-assisted, hand drawings and plans weren’t as fast and were more difficult to share with a client in Addis Ababa, for instance. Dad certainly didn’t seem to be too bothered by CAD technology, and I know he wouldn’t have had trouble adapting, but he just didn’t understand the “why” everything had to be so fast. In the early 2000s, one of the siblings bought my parents a cellphone. Mom said it was too small which translated into, “Ain’t gonna happen.” And my father thought it was just a way for his children to keep track of him, also “ain’t gonna happen”. The phone was in pristine condition, in its original box and cellophane wrapper when we cleaned their home after they’d passed away. The cellphone was one thing they didn’t buy into, and the answering machine was another. Mom always thought she could hear someone talking in the front hallway and Dad (who was more tech savvy than Mom) never bothered to check for messages. Dozens of old, some important, voice messages were played back as we sorted through their lives in 2009. Sometimes I wonder if there will be a day when I decide I’m no longer interested in keeping up-to-date. The nut, I’ve heard, doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I’m sure our children shake their heads whenever we ask a “tech” question.
In the late 1960s the company I worked for paid some of their staff members to take a computing systems course at one of New York’s State Universities. At the time our company computer was a behemoth located in Philadelphia. We communicated with the mainframe via TWX. All billing and inventory was controlled this way—after a lot of double-checked and edited, handwritten input. The long and short of it was, it was a state-of-the-art system in the ’60s. I spent about eighteen months learning to produce flowcharts, to program in COBOL and Fortran, then to read TWX tapes and how to code for input. We thought we were on the edge with a computer that required its own building and air conditioning system and probably only had the internal memory capacity of an 1990s ancient desktop system. The retrieval of data depended upon the user’s memory of the disk number where the information was stored. And all of the twelve-inch disks were stored on a rolling-rack in a storage facility. Oh, the changes I’ve seen since those days. When personal computing systems became popular, my parents acquired a desktop system. My dad didn’t see any reason to use it— he still had his drawing board and drafting machine—but for some reason Mom thought it would be a step-up from her Selectric typewriter. Although Mom went to business college, she never learned to navigate a keyboard. Why she thought she could handle a home computer was baffling to me. She never did get the hang of it. The computer never knew she was finished typing a letter simply because she’d typed “yours truly”. Within months, the initial fascination wore off and the computer was treated with the same distain as the cellphone and the answering machine.
My parents, at the age I am now, put the brakes on, as regards technology, and refused to move forward with “the times”. They had bank cards because someone at the bank told them it was safer than carrying cash around. They continued to carry cash and wisely wrote their PINs on their unused bank cards. My dad was fascinated by my brother’s early version of an in-car GPS, but didn’t really understand why you’d bother if you had a good map. The bread machine didn’t impress either of them, and when their washer and dryer was replaced with machines that didn’t have twist dials, the laundry occasionally waited until one of us showed up to give another lesson. They’d drawn a line and refused to step over it. Even having a physical with their doctors, or the seemingly endless number of tests that followed, was too much technology. I accompanied my mother to her X-ray and CAT scan appointments, and short of getting into the picture with her, it was a struggle to convince the imaging technicians to let me stay in the room with her. I’m sure some of you understand, have been there or are there. As much as LOML and I roll with “the newest and the next”, we wonder if this batch of “newest and next” will be the last gizmos and gadgets we bring home. And then?
Well, and then from the front room I hear, “Hey Google, tell me a Dad joke.”
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