I truly hope this not one of those things that has been circulating through cyberspace for years and I have missed it. If so I apologize but I thought, in light of the recent conversations around social media, this might just describe many of us who are still trying to program our VCR. Enjoy!
When I bought my Blackberry, I thought about the 30-year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures and communicates with Facebook and Twitter. I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grandkids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.
That was before one of my grandkids hooked me up for Tweeter, Tweetree, Twhirl, Twitterfon, Tweetie and Twittererific Tweetdeck, Twitpix and something that sends every message to my cell phone and every other program within the texting world.
My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.
The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it's red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife and everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. I had to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.
I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside that gadget was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, “Re-calc-u-lating.” You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then if I made a right turn instead. Well, it was not a good relationship.When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.
To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 14 years, but I still haven’t figured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.
The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden “Paper or Plastic?” every time I check out just knocks me for a loop. I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused, but I never remember to take them in with me.
Now I toss it back to them. When they ask me, “Paper or Plastic?” I just say, “Doesn’t matter to me. I am bi-sacksual.” Then it’s their turn to stare at me with a blank look. I was recently asked if I tweet. I answered, No, but I do toot a lot.”
Us senior citizens don’t need anymore gadgets. The tv remote and the garage door remote are about all we can handle.
I am 30 and grew up with the (dial-up) internet and (Kraft dinner box-sized) cell phones. I feel the exact same way you do. I love the idea of reducing the number of email addresses and social media accounts I currently possess (I’ve lost count and don’t even get me started on remembering passwords). I even love the idea of skinny-ing down on technology (as a fellow VoicEd contributor so eloquently put it,) but NOT in the classroom. This is where we need to embrace it and use it and max it out because it engages students, they get spring in their step, a project is catapulted to a whole other level when they can work on something online, or using a desktop publisher for that matter. Even hand writing out a revised copy and then good copy has become a chore for most students today. I’m not saying we can only text them and that they should be plugged in 24/7 but we’ve got to get more connected and less teacher-directed in our learning environments or the students will disengage faster than you can type LOL.