Okay, okay. I admit that I have not kept myself up to date with regard to social media or current methods of social interaction. Or should I say: lack thereof. In my estimation, these days people spend an inordinate amount of time interacting with portable machines when they are around others. Tablets and smartphones.
Does anybody talk to the person in front of them anymore? Why be physically present if you aren’t going to engage visually?
That being said, I have found myself drawn into and engaged in that behavior. Electronic gadgets are quite convenient, especially when you need to know or confirm a bit of trivia. I was the first to get a tablet in our family (that everybody else used) as a gift for my birthday one year, but I refused a smartphone. I was resistant to obtaining this new technology. I didn’t think that it was worth the monthly fee. I mean, I rarely get texts or phone calls anyway.
And when I do… Well, I am a phone call screener.
In case you didn’t get it, that picture is a joke. But hits close to home. I kept the original cell phone that I got in the first decade of this century. It was a source of never-ending mirth for my younger co-workers.
They enjoyed poking fun at me and would tease me for my lack of keeping up with the times.
But I was tough and held out. Finally, one of the numbers on the keypad of my Star Trek communicator (how I referred to my “flip” phone) broke down, and I needed to turn it in and get a new one. My hubby and I went to the store, and I chose the free phone with the service even though he urged me to upgrade and get a smartphone. Again, I decided to remain stalwart in my choice of using antiquated contraptions.
I asked the sales representative if he could transfer my data from my old phone into the new one. I brought it out and presented it to him.
He looked at me as if I had stepped through a wormhole with a papyrus of Egyptian hieroglyphics and asked him to translate it.
A quizzical look and then consternation appeared on his face. He said, “I don’t think we carry the cable for this phone anymore.” Then he skeptically added, “We may have it stored in the back; let me check.” Several minutes later, he returned with bad news. “Nope, sorry, don’t have it anymore. You’ll have to transfer the data manually.”
Seriously? Arggh. Annoyance, but at least I got a good laugh when I relayed my tale of relic cable woe to my co-workers the next day. Aside from their merriment with my old-fashioned ways, one of them good-naturedly helped to start me on my pathway of reprogramming.
I managed to re-input all my data but didn’t know how to transfer the few pictures that I had taken with the old phone. I asked my son and my husband to help me with this task but wasn’t persistent, and it never got done. The phone went into a drawer and was forgotten.
So I was doing some rearranging and reorganization of stuff this summer and happened upon the old phone. Miraculously, we found its cord and powered it up. I saw the pictures and wanted them retrieved. Here’s one of them. That’s a baby crow that I rehabilitated and released back into the wild.
I love corvids (crows, ravens, blue jays, etc) so I just had to keep that picture!
We had to order another cord off the internet and then ran into more complications because the system was so old. My husband had to spend nearly an hour on the phone with a technician. Finally, he got the pictures off my old phone and onto my computer. And he knows computers!
If I would have tried to do it, I am afraid that the exceedingly polite and helpful young man on the other end of the line would have put a gun to his head to finally end the misery.
So much time is consumed in becoming updated!
I guess that’s what happens when you don’t stay current. Convinced, I knew that I needed to become smarter when it came to technology.
