A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
Recently, I was reading an article in “Astronomy Magazine” about the Pluto New Horizons mission. There was a section on why it was downgraded from planetary status. Now I’ve got to unlearn some things about the place. Like so many other things, that got me to thinking about how I’ve had to forget or change my thinking on many other subjects.
For years I’ve saved all my files with an eight character file name. Back in the DOS and early Windows days, file names were limited to eight characters and three more for the extension. You had to be creative in naming files so you could remember what they were. Over the years, most file systems have allowed us to use up to 256 characters. I finally unlearned using non-descriptive file names. I still haven’t unlearned that it’s not okay to use a space in a file name.
I’ve had to unlearn a lot of terms over the years. Sometimes, I still find myself saying, “dial the phone”, even though my pocket computer doesn’t have a dial on it. Unlike my wife, I’ve finally quit saying “tape a TV show.” There isn’t any tape in the VCR. Oops! I meant DVR. Many others like myself still, “film a movie”, “roll down the car window”, “blow off steam” and make a “carbon copy.” People that haven’t unlearned this stuff should “hold their horses” before they start sounding like a “broken record”.
There is a lot of things I haven’t minded unlearning. It is so much easier to double click an icon to start a program on my computer. Long gone are the days of having to type “load program name,8,1”. There were many times I sat and waited for a program to load. I would finally realize that I had forgotten to hit the return key.
I also don’t mind having to remember to make sure there is enough room on the VHS cassette tape before recording the latest Star Trek program. The same goes for setting the clock on the machine.
I’ve also have many non-technological things to unlearn. Before I pour a glass of milk, I still shake the container even though there isn’t any cream to mix in. I still let the water run before filling my glass. I don’t want to get a spider in my glass.
About the only thing I’ve found worse than having to unlearn something is the things I’ve had to relearn. I’ve been teaching the grandson how to code a web page. Unfortunately, I’ve had to look up some commands that I used to write without even thinking. One of the problems with programming languages is there are so many of them.
Isn’t technology great? I wonder what I’ll have to unlearn in the future.
Thanks for reading.