chelsea headingIt is almost amazing to me when sometimes our 21st century technical devices do not work or work very poorly and not as they should. What is really amazing is how much we depend on them without even knowing it. As you know by my email address, we are subscribers to Cox.net and use all three subscriptions; telephone, internet and television. Cox works pretty well most of the time but when it doesn’t work we are left in a desert without any means of communication or receiving news or information. What if a tragedy happened somewhere in Northwestern Blavonovich? What if the leader of Mesotopia decided to not pay homage to our leader? How would we know of it and know it was time to wail and worry? These are important things and should be considered seriously.
 Hang on! Maybe that isn’t so bad after all. At the present time two world leaders of their respective nations are having an ego contest which threatens other nations. Actually, according to some news reports, their actions could endanger the whole world: all the snakes, crawly things, swinging from tree branches things, things in places no man has ever wandered (on purpose), swimming things and even people. That may be a bit “over-the-top” for us to worry about as you know how things are reported all out of proportion. But none of that will matter if we do not know of it. We need some news about all this so we can get more and more nervous. After all, what is the use of having all these devices if we cannot use them for an entire hour?
As an old man I am not expected to be up to par on technical things. That and the senior citizen discount at some rare eating place is about the only advantage to being a senior citizen. However, there are a lot of technical things I do know but do not let on that I do. For instance, when I went to the Apple Genius in the Apple store and taught him how to download books, I have never been back there. Why should I go for advice from someone i have to teach how to do things. But... there are many other situations where I need advice and help so I pretend I am an old man. Old men are not supposed to know anything so I don’t. You can meet some nice people by needing help.
Even in the non-technical world people will help an old person if he/she appears to be in need. At my volunteer job doing reading books at the Salvation Army, whenever I get a cart of books to unload there is almost always someone of the younger fellows who will lift the full boxes from the cart. What there is left of my back muscles tells me, right away, that I shouldn’t try to be macho and drag out a box and end up in the bone hospital. There was one crew of younger men who would stop and come over to my department if they just saw me bending over a box. “Here let me do that,” or “You don’t need to be trying to do that,” was said often and I did not like it when they left. I know it will be difficult but try to imagine being an Oklahoma school teacher and getting respect.
Yessir, you are correct, it doesn’t happen often and never at the state level.
But lifting boxes and doing technical share one thing for older people. Old people should injure themselves trying to do weight and they do not have any technical knowledge in their brain. Wellsir, part of that is true.  Just as many of you did or will do later, I made a decision I could keep up with the technical advances which were coming my way as a figurative hurricane or I could do my job and try not to be left too far behind. For awhile in my school system I was the “go-to” person but that didn’t last very long. It didn’t take long for all the study I did and the books I studied to become obsolete and I began to do quite a bit of telephoning when things went wrong. That was often. I believe I told you that recently when I called Cox tech support i was left hanging until I hung up after talking to a support rep. Later a female told me that the techs are told that if they do not know how to fix a problem, do as he did. Either let the line go blank or turn it to some other tech. I sat there with a live phone while he probably had a cuppa.
Instead of helping, all Apple and Microsoft have done is attempt to out tech each other when they could have made things so easy to use, without major problems, that everyone would be happy. It didn’t happen