I’m thinking today that maybe it was a bad idea for our species to progress beyond vacuum tubes. Hell, I’m so annoyed with my various gadgets that the Industrial Revolution itself is sounding questionable to me. I’m sure that 18th Century farmers, shopkeepers, and blacksmiths rarely felt the need to hurl their tools through the nearest window. But, man, I sure do. Here’s why:
- The keypad on my cell phone has quite suddenly stopped working. I try to scroll through my list of contacts and the buttons either stick or are doing some kind of triple-action or something, because they won’t go sequentially from one name to the next. They’re leaping across six or seven names at a time.
- My crappy DVD player seems to think that a request to go to the “episode selection” menu on one of my new Star Trek: The Animated Series DVD is an instruction to go to sleep. I end up with a blue screen that says “Welcome.” This is not happening on any of my other DVDs, and the disc that’s causing the problem worked fine at The Girlfriend’s house last night.
- I’ve been having problems accessing Bloglines so I can catch up on what’s going on in the world.
- And, if all that isn’t enough, the CD I’m listening to is stuck in the middle of Prince’s “Purple Rain” and making an incredibly annoying “wha-wha-wha-wha-wha” sound. Yes, I’m still a pre-iPod Luddite who listens to music in the form of shiny silver discs instead of streams of data. Given the luck I seem to be having with high-tech stuff today, I may just go shopping for a hand-cranked Victrola…
[ADDENDUM: As if I didn’t have enough evidence for my argument that we’d all be better off if the quill pen made a comeback, my ISP seems to be having trouble keeping me online today, and Gmail is apparently too colossally cool for my antiquated dial-up connection. As the bimbo character (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) frequently remarks in Singin’ in the Rain, “I caaaaaan’t stanit.”]
I’m beginning to think that cell phones are the new cigarettes. They just don’t belong in public places. Do what you want in private, but I don’t want to breathe your smoke or listen to your conversation when I’m in a restaurant, cafe, or park.
It wouldn’t be so bad if people would just get it into their heads that you don’t have to scream into the phone for it to work. It’s not a tin can on a wire. You’re not in a combat zone. I’ve tested this theory many, many times, and you can have a perfectly normal cell phone conversation speaking at low volume–like you would in any public place to a person sitting right next to you.
Grr.
I get really freaked out by the Bluetooth wireless headsets that allow people to talk on their cells “hands-free.” It used to be that if you spotted someone walking down the street talking to themselves, you knew to cross to the other side before you got close to them. It’s not so easy to tell who’s crazy anymore…