Even Though He Wanders, the Guy Might not be Lost
April 18, 2014
Job Bartering For Fun and Profit
May 16, 2014
This essay relates to an adventure (or misadventure as the case may be) that’s taken place over the past three weeks. At this point I’m just waiting till I’m in a little bit better position financially before I take the next step technologically.
Word Count: 869
A New Definition
Of Technological Frustration
So here we are fourteen years into the 21st Century and whether some folks want to admit it or not, technology is becoming a more and more pervasive aspect of our lives. You can hide from it, which is what some of my friends and family do (including me to an extent), but you can’t really avoid it. Not if you want to move forward as a viable member of modern society anyway.
Basically you’re forced to choose between two options. Option #1; Move to a remote fishing village in Greenland where you can live out the rest of your days in obscure isolation. Option #2; Totally embrace modern technology in all its glory and excess. This includes spending inordinate amounts of one’s day with eyes glued to a computer screen-constantly updating a Facebook page and sending Twitter messages to various friends and some enemies. You walk down the street with your face plastered to a smart phone screen and almost get run over while crossing the street. Talking to other human beings? Who needs that when we’ve got Texting.
Since I enjoy sleeping on a regular basis and spending lots of time outdoors Option #2 is not a very viable choice. Option #1 isn’t feasible either since I like to travel all over the globe and relish the eating of exotic foods in all sorts of incarnations. So what have I done? Namely something most government entities have a hard time doing, compromise.
I do all of my writing off a computer these days, and post new rants to my Blog every two weeks whether people want me to or not. Definitely consider the World Wide Web (Internet) to be one of the truly great inventions of the past twenty years.
Along a similar, but opposite tack, I will never Textor use Twitter and still have yet to get a Facebook page.Heck, I didn’t even get a cell phone till three years ago. This brings us to my latest observation concerning how modern society has forced individuals to update their technology whether they want to or not.
A month ago I flew out to California to participate in a literary reading, hang out with my cousin and his family, and take in a few sites I haven’t visited since I was knee high to a grasshopper. The last night I was there, my cousin gave me this small carry-on bag to bring with me on the plane. What should I do but inadvertently leave it on the plane while catching a connecting flight in Las Vegas. Contained within that carry-on was the charger unit for my trusty cell phone. Didn’t even notice I’d left the bag on the plane from Oakland to Lost Wages till after the plane was off the ground I’d settled in on my corresponding flight to Denver. At that point it was too late to even try and retrieve the bag so I just sat back and told myself, “Cest la vie.” Life is too short to worry about all this trivial shit-right? One would like to think so.
Unfortunately this was just the beginning of a strange step forward in my technological advancement. The cell phone didn’t start running out of gas and signal me to re-charge it till three days after I’d returned home. Then it didn’t completely give up the ghost till the following Tuesday. At that point I started checking out options for getting a new charger. Easier said than done Sportsfans.
Turns out that even though I thought it was new when I got the cell phone in April of 2012, it’s old hat technology. Not as ancient as the pyramids, but totally antiquated in the eyes of modern society. Flip phones-what are those? Everyone and their cousin is using a Smart Phone these days. Getting a new charger for a Pantec II cell phone might as well be as difficult to purchase as obtaining The Hope Diamond for your dust collecting curio cabinet in the sitting room.
Ordered what I thought was a correct charger and when it arrived in the snail mail it was the wrong one of course. Explored a few other options including the purchase of whole new cell phone. Eventually my stepmother assisted me to get a new charger for the original phone and now I’m back where I started. Still using the old cell phone and living a completely inadequate life. Every step of the way I kept hearing my phone was totally outdated and I need to update my technology soon. If I don’t, the world will soon implode upon itself and my life will be as incomplete as a caveman without his rock.
This I will indeed do as eventually I’ll get a nifty new Smart Phone for communication purposes. If only because of the fact that I’ve found the current flip phone to be as easy to operate as that surveillance drone you purchased last week. Obviously the engineers that designed this current cell phone created it so the thing would become obsolete within a year or two. Got to buy that latest version or risk becoming medieval.
