Can You Hear Me Now?

Okay, P.C.’s have been around for about 20 years. Not to mention fax machines, cell phones, PDA’s, Blackberries, Blueberries and Strawberries. Are we really better off? Maybe they all deserve a big Raspberry. All of this technology was supposed to make our lives simpler, better and happier. Bill Gates prophesied the paperless office years ago. Problem is, someone invented printers. Do you have less paper around the office than you did 20 years ago? Do you have less stress? Do you feel less harried and rushed? Hehehe. I didn’t think so. Instead of enjoying the paper over a cup of morning coffee or after work in the recliner, we are constantly checking the internet on our handheld devices for news and stock market reports. We’re plugged in minute-by-minute. E-mail’s flying back and forth around the globe 24-7. Texting on the interstate while trying to talk to Hong Kong, listening to a podcast on the MP3 player all the while juggling a bagel and Starbucks. Oops, try not to hit the guardrail. Maybe your life is hitting the guardrail. The more connected we are the more disconnected from what really matters in life we really are.

I maintain that these devices really have not delivered on their promise of simplifying our lives. Think about your P.C. There’s enough computing power in a modest priced home P.C. to easily manage a manned trip to the moon, but what has it really done for you lately? Does it free up all of those mundane, time-consuming tasks so that you have more leisure time to spend recreating with your family? Be honest. Most people spend mindless hours checking silly emails, surfing the internet for useless news or occasionally writing a paper. Not to mention the hours a week spent just to keep the darn thing running right. Quick, how many unread emails do you have in your inbox? 3421? When are you going to get around to reading all of that riveting information? Think of all of your P.C. applications. Every time you want to try to do something you have to run out and buy another application. There’s no guarantee that it’s actually going to do what you need done. It takes weeks of studying the manual (if you can find one and if it’s not full of typo’s and if it’s written by someone in the U.S.A. who actually can compose a complete sentence in English) and experimenting with all of the complex ‘shortcut keys’ and ‘keystroke combinations.’ (Shift-Alt-Z, while tapping your right foot and sticking out your tongue) Then you get to manually enter your three years worth of data because of course it doesn’t talk nice with other applications or even earlier versions of itself. Then you discover that it doesn’t really generate the report that you need. These applications are written by geeks from Mars who have never seen daylight and design them like an M.C. Escher painting, stairways going ever upward in perpetual circles but never actually going anywhere. They are mind-numbingly complex but in the final analysis don’t do much for you that you couldn’t do quicker and better with a legal pad, calculator and #2 pencil. The end result is always mediocre and lacking some important component that you really wanted included. Not to mention that they don’t talk to each other very well at all or to other computers and applications out there in the internet. Why can’t we just tell the computer in plain English what we need and have it do it? Let it go out on the internet and find some way of getting the job done without our time, input and oversight. Let us know when it’s done and give us a result in the format that we want.

While we’re at it can we please eliminate the cryptic messages and nonsensical keys on these devices? What happened to ‘On/Off?!’ Eliminating that was simply un-American. Does anybody know what that triangle with a vertical line in the middle means on my fax machine?? Who dreamed up this stuff? How about my favorite internet browser message, ‘Done, but with errors on page.’ What are the errors? Are they important? Is something important being left out? Do I need to fix it? Can I fix it? Ballpean hammer please. Why does Windows give me those error messages with numerical codes? Where is the secret decoder book? I have called Microsoft and they don’t even know what they mean. And for us baby-boomers could someone please make screen text that can be read without a giant magnifying glass?! And what’s with those microscopic keys that can only be operated by using a sewing needle to tap them? I sense a conspiracy between the manufacturers, optometrists and physical therapists. OK, take a breath.

Bottom line; we have become slaves to our technology rather than making our technology serve our needs and make our lives better. We blindly chase after the newest, smallest, fastest devices with the most functions per cubic inch. We’re so overwhelmed and frazzled with the dizzying onslaught of information that we can’t sleep at night. We take Ambien to fall asleep and Red Bull to wake up. Headache, heartburn and high blood pressure medication flies off of the shelves hand-over-fist. So ask yourself; with all of this techno-help are you making more money, enjoying more leisure time and having more fun? I didn’t think so. Here’s my parting advice, TURN IT OFF! (if you can find the right button, lol)