A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
I remember back in the early 1960’s when my father, a feed salesman, was received a Texas Instruments calculator from his company. At that time, the TI was a top of the line calculator with an electronic memory. This machine could add, subtract, divide and multiply. He was proud of that calculator. If you would ask him to add multiply 2 times 3, he would get the machine out to do the problem.
I was reminded of that calculator a few weeks ago when someone I know turned on their global positioning system to get directions to drive to Beaumont from Lake Charles. Luckily, we got to the right place because he knew where it was. The GPS address put us a couple of blocks away.
Every month or so, I scroll through the saved television programs list on my digital video recorder and delete programs that I’ve recorded. I realize now that I just don’t have the time to watch them all. Besides, I have to make some room for the new programs I want to record.
These incidents are starting to make me wonder if our society might be getting “over-technologied”. Don’t bother to look that word up in your dictionary or thesaurus. Over-technologied is a term that I made up to describe a situation where technology is used either unnecessarily, stupidly, inadequately or in some other silly manner. I think that people who have the latest, greatest, newest technology and then don’t know how to use it are extremely over-technologied. I made up the word, so I guess I can make up the definition.
For example, how many people do you know that have thousands of pictures and movies saved on their huge hard drives? With high speed digital cameras it is easy to take ten pictures instead of one. You have a better chance of getting the “perfect” picture but end up not being able to find it because you have to sort through a thousand pictures to find it. Isn’t that being over-technologied?
It’s election season again and I get countless phone spam calls urging me to vote for candidate Mr./Mrs./Ms. over-technologied. I call them that because they have used technology to call every phone number and irritate the people on the other end. I use my own technology to keep track of who I get unwanted calls from. The over-technologied candidate doesn’t get my vote.
How many people do you know have a microwave oven that will defrost, weigh the food and then start cooking so as to be finished just in time for dinner? Many of them have more than timer, a whole bunch of built in programmed recipes and many other features. If they’re like most people, they use their microwave to reheat their leftovers or make popcorn. Do you think they might be over-technologied?
I could probably write three or four articles on how our cell phones are over-technologied. Personally, I don’t even carry a cell phone. I usually just carry my pocket computer which also happens to be able to connect to Sprint if I want to make a phone call. If you don’t agree that cell phones are over-technonologied, ask the next ten people you see how many applications they have on their cell phone. Then ask them how many they actually use.
When I was a kid, my old junker car would break down on the side of the road. It was usually pretty easy for me to fix it. These days I drive an over-technologied pickup. If there is a breakdown, I might as well call for a tow truck because the mechanic would have to run a computer diagnostic before he could fix the darn thing.
Do you think that modern cameras are over-technologied? My camera is a couple of years old and still has more features than I ever use. The instruction manual is about three fourths of an inch thick. I often wonder if I will ever learn how to do some of the advanced functions. I probably would have the time to memorize the instructions if I could just get away from my over-technologied television.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this tongue-in-cheek article about having too much technology. Be careful, technology can also be dangerous. An incident with my debit card is what got me thinking about too much technology in the first place. If you’ve got the time, just Google “dangers of too much technology” and read the 239 million articles for yourself.
I could probably ramble on for a couple more pages about how we are over-technologied. I just realized that having five computers on my home network isn’t enough. I’ve got to go do some research on that tablet computer I want to buy. After all, I want to stay over-technologied.
Thanks for reading.