What goes around…

All too well I remember grinning madly and trying to stifle laughter when I re-programmed my Grandmother’s VCR, reset the clock and so forth when I went to visit her.

She could not figure out how to do it. Never mind every grandchild showed her how to do it. It was just too much for her. And I thought it was funny.

If you are my age you know exactly what I’m talking about. The snickers, sniggers and hidden grins as generations before us were confounded by the simplest of technology. We could make a VCR do anything we wanted it to. Admittedly it was not capable of doing a lot, but we could work it.

Kids today have no idea what a VCR is. If they come across a VCR tape, they hold it up and wonder what kind of book doesn’t have pages or a screen to view the text. 

If the VCR was our technological triumph over our elders, the smart phone is our doom. We have replaced our parents and grandparents. We are the ones confounded. The new generation is hiding grins and stifling laughter as we hold out a smart phone and say “help.”

“It’s easy, Dad,” my daughter says, taking the phone and with a few taps and finger swipes, she has logged onto the internet, checked email and Facebook, posted a Tik Tok video, ordered pizza, a movie, messaged everyone she knows and a few she doesn’t in case they need to know what she’s doing and looked up the definition of VCR.

I sit in my chair and wonder what happened and how it happened. I have learned better than to ask her to explain it again. I get enough eye-rolls and huffs and muttered comments when I tell Jesse to clean his room. I don’t need more attitude when I’m trying to learn to do something.

Comparing today’s smart phones to our VCRs is like comparing a cave man to NASA rocket scientist. You know somewhere down deep if you look hard enough you’ll find the same basic building materials. But that’s all you’re going to get.

Somewhere on the evolutionary ladder, the cave man stepped off and started painting buffalo on cave walls while the NASA guy kept going and eventually started discovering questionable signs of intelligence on other planets and Hollywood. The VCR stepped off the ladder of evolution around 1983 while the smart phone strapped on a rocket pack and skipped climbing altogether because it’s too slow.

Along the way, the smart phone picked up “apps.” I am not entirely sure what an “app” is, except they sometimes cost money and don’t have any practical use. I am told there’s an app you can download and hold your phone up to the night sky. The app will tell you the sky has stars in it. When I was a teenager we had to actually look at the night sky to see if there were stars overhead. Today’s new generation is apparently incapable of looking at the night sky and seeing stars without a battery-powered electronic interface.

As soon as someone comes out with a “clean my room app” or “wash the dishes app” for teenagers, I will say it’s useful. Personally, I want an app that will let smart phones play my collection of VCR tapes.