Exercising my ‘old guy’ privilege to be contradictory about ‘gadgets’
You might say I’m exercising my “old guy” privileges to be somewhat contradictory about my last post regarding “gadgets” and high-tech stuff. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about digital cameras.
A friend of ours from far away was coming through town last week and spent two nights staying with us. She’s from Idaho and was my wife’s best-friend from high school. (I won’t say when they graduated, but I graduated in 1965 and they were two years before me. HAH!) This friend, we’ll call her Judy, has an old-fashioned look-through-the-viewfinder, 35mm camera. That’s in keeping with Judy’s “anti-high-tech-anti-electronic-gadgets” outlook on life. Just the opposite of my wife and I, who are pretty computer and gadget savvy.
I was lauding the joys of our simple but effective digital Kodak. She told me about the 62 rolls of film she brought back from a trip last year to Panama. I was amazed. “Judy,” I said (or something like that), “why, I’ve got an sd flash memory card in this camera not much bigger than two thumbnails which will hold over 900 color pictures. It’s great.”
Judy quickly pointed out that she doesn’t even own a computer, so probably that wouldn’t be too useful for her.
The final blow to my “gadget arrogance,” though, came when she handed me her camera to take a picture of her and my wife. It had the old “hold-in-near-your-eyeball” viewfinder and a button you give a single, solid push on to take pictures. It was wonderful looking in the viewfinder, instead of holding my digital camera almost arms length and tilting/tipping the camera around trying to center the image. When I pushed the shutter button, there was a satisfying click, immediate response, and the joy of hearing the film whir as it advanced automatically to the next frame.
Ah, I missed all those things from old 35mm cameras I had in the past.
Judy went back to Idaho yesterday. We really enjoyed seeing her and hearing of her many adventures throughout the U.S., Mexico, and South America. I particularly enjoyed that single chance to use her old-fashioned camera. Maybe I’ll get one and let the battery-draining-digital set on the shelf for awhile. Who knows …
Major misconception: ‘Old people’ are ‘anti-gadget’ or ‘anti-technology’
There’s a major misconception floating around in our culture (at least some strains of “pop culture” here in the U.S.) that “old people” are somewhat high-tech “impaired” or downright anti-technology or anti-gadget, or some such silliness.
I have one caveat about my remarks here: One of the mentally sharpest, highly educated people I know personally (you know who you are, David) probably fits into this category. He’s a retired university history prof who avoids computers like they were carriers of the black plague. His wife finally got him to grudgingly read email his last year on faculty — but he still wouldn’t REPLY to the email.
My wife and I are both in our 60s (one of us is two years older than the other, but I won’t rat her out on this one, no sir) and we embrace technology. We each have a laptop computer (mine is Toshiba; hers Gateway) that we use daily. I’m the designated “IT” person in the house, so I keep our wireless home network running just fine. She does some blogging and a ton of email. She does professional freelance proofreading on her computer and sends files to editors via email.
The only reason we don’t have ipods or iphones is that we simply cannot justify the expense and time right now.
But we, as are almost all of the people our age that we know, are NOT in any way intimidated about jumping into new technology as the occasion arises. I personally am eager to try just about every shiny, new object I see looking around electronics and gadget sites — but money always is an issue right now. Besides, there are a lot of important and better things to do with our money than waste it on gadgets or HDTV.
Take it from these old people (if you want to call us “old,” that is), we Baby Boomers and pre-Baby Boomers are embracing the toys and gadgets just fine, thank you!
Our latest adventure in home ownership — new water heater
We just completed another great adventure in home ownership — we had to have a new water heater installed a few days ago. Not only was it twice as much as we wanted to pay, but there were all sorts of complications in the process thanks to our VERY OLD house. Yup, if you’ve lived in an old house and had a water heater installed, you’ve guessed what our problem was: The pressure from the new water heater in the very old, very clogged, gunky water pipes, immediately stopped up every faucet in the house!
If you have car problems, you can take it to a garage, they put it up on one of their car lifts, and find what’s clogged/plugged/broken, etc., to take care of it. If you have plugged pipes in an old house, the process is a little different — the “mechanic” (in this case a plumber; Sam the Plumber) ends up crawling under the sinks and cabinets to get to the old pipes. The good news was that the water heater was in a walk-in basement, so he was able to access it without problems. But he spent several hours on the main floor of the house and in the upstairs bathroom getting all the scaly stuff cleared out of the pipes.
Fortunately, he quoted a lump-sum price instead of charging us by the hour! (His boss is a friend of ours and was willing to help us out on the whole deal “pricewise,” so I have no complaints there.)
As far as the plumber knows, the old heater was the oldest still-functioning water heater he’d ever known about. It was manufactured in 1963. He was amazed, and so were we.
We also have a great deal more wonderfully HOT water now!
‘Real Subliminal’ products
