Future is here and it’s kind of weird but not too shocking

Once upon a time, I said that I only needed a computer that would act as a word processor and nothing more. Later, I developed a need for the Internet. Then came a requirement for working on spreadsheets. Photo editing eventually became a need because I started using a digital camera. Later my phone acted as a camera and a music platform as well. And then I found myself needing a Power Point, or in my case, the OpenOffice Presentation. Pretty soon, I was on Facebook and Twitter. After awhile, I was a regular computer geek.

Maybe I wasn’t a regular computer geek. Perhaps I was an irregular computer geek. Well, let’s say I was an irregular computer geek and a dyed-in-the-wool geek.

Some 25 years ago I didn’t even imagine I would be using a computer, much less did I think I would be using the damned thing every blamed day. I am five posts away from having 2,400 blog posts. What the hell is this blog thing? That’s like a diary isn’t it? I figured a few of my friends would look at it and we’d have some laughs. I have visitors from 27 different countries. Why would someone from Ukraine or Iraq or Ireland or even Morgantown, W.Va. Feel the need to read my musings?

I listen to music and read the newspaper on my laptop. I take photographs, do calculations, check the compass and even find my way on a map using my telephone. Imagine that? I don’t need a telephone man (or woman) to wire my house or connect a line to my home. I don’t even have wires going to my phone. I always take it with me when I go somewhere. I don’t have one ringer sound. I have as many sounds as I can afford or within my imagination. I am not charged for long-distance calls. I can send as many text messages as I want. I have 400 minutes of phone. Crap on a stick! I don’t even need a fourth of that.

I can remember my family’s first TV set, vaguely. My parents had black and white TV all their lives, even though they could have afforded color in the later years of their lives. I also remember the first telephone my folks had, at least once I joined them. Apparently they had one before I was born and then went without one for several years. Our phone was on a “party-line.” I can remember Mrs. Irons, who lived in the house across the front part of our field from us and also on our party-line, talking to her sister. Sometime they would be talking about canning vegetables or gossiping. I wasn’t supposed to be listening in. Most of the time, nothing the women said was worth eavesdropping.

When I first read the sociological gem “Future Shock,” I wondered about the type of society that could freak out over too much change happening too quickly. I have lived that type of change and, yes, it’s pretty amazing. Maybe it is the convenience that technology provides which provides a “future shock absorber.” Then maybe it’s not. Excuse me now, while I go put my TV dinner in the microwave for a couple of minutes.