Pickles by Brian Crane for May 29, 2018

It’s a high tech world now, and kids don’t know anything else. Us older folks, however, watched the world change before our very eyes.

MY phone’s six-digit password spells my name alphanumerically. (No, it’s not “templo.”)

“Yes, but nowadays I dip with my phone.”

You don’t have a clue kid. We’re having an easier time in your world than you ever would’ve had in ours when we were kids.

Once you get to be your gramma’s age it’ll be just the same for you, Nelson.

Her bunny slippers are cute.

You would be nothing without her, Nelson!

I had to laugh (actually, it was a “OMG, I’M OLD” realization) at our library recently when they had an “Antique Technology” display which included a Princess Phone, a manual AND electric typewriter, and a reel to reel tape recorder….among other things. ALL things I have used growing up. And to me, a Princess phone is NOT an antique! (And neither is anything else, really).

And if Nelson isn’t careful, Opal just might teach him another use for the spoon.

I lived next door to a man who got his first airplane ride with Charles Lindberg, who was flying a mail plane!

Nelson might have to learn how to bake his own cookies. I can put Kodachrome slides in a carousel tray and thread a movie projector but I can also force stop apps, clear the cache, restart in safe mode, access systems apps, etc. etc. (and I even can spell et cetera).

I believe the term is “planned obsolescence;” an item designed and manufactured to wear out or basically self-destruct within a certain period so the consumer must purchase a replacement. Being something of an antique myself, I sympathize. Hang in there, Opal.

There you go, Opal! But I’m catching up a bit with tech stuff. I I keep forgetting it’s the 20th century! Oops, I mean the 21st, lol!

Stolen off a tee shirt…..

Improvement brings deteroiration.

A conversation in the seats behind me in the cafe today, involved a young person telling a man in his 60s how much superior the sound quality of LPs was to that of CDs. I had to agree.

help please save me, I am an analog man living in a digital world

I still have my Encyclopedia set! Ha!! ;)

Cleopatra would have had little trouble adjusting to the world my parents were born into in the early part of the 20th century. There was no television, radios and cars existed, but the average person couldn’t afford them, and they were pretty much pieces of junk anyway. By the time they died, 80/90 years later, we had changed more than in the 2/3000+ years since Cleopatra lived. Even the people have changed to be more technologically proficient. My three year old grandson can manage to make calls, play several games, look up information in written or verbal form, and I don’t even know what else. I figure if I have managed to make it to the princess phone and selectric typewriter era without my brain exploding, I’m doing pretty well.

I was using computers in the 1970s – I don’t need any kid to tell me how to do things. When you think how long ago the computer was invented and that its developers (many of them women) are long dead; it’s amazing. Kids might know what to do but they don’t know how the technology works.

Don’t forget – it’s us old fogies who developed the technologies you youngin’s use today.