Baahh! I have been recently referred to as a Luddite!!
I can assure you nothing is further from the truth. I love technology and time saving devices. In theory, if we accumulate enough of them, we should have a surplus of free time right? Who wouldn’t want that? Sure, I may prefer the sun over a watch to tell time, I don’t watch T.V. (they shut it off in June right?), and I may be one of the last cell phone holdouts, but there are lots of ingenious gadgets that really get me going. I am particularly fond of the wheel, I am a sucker for a good lever and fulcrum, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reached for a hammer and put it to good use.
Luddite? I don’t think so. It’s buttons I abhor. I have settled on the idea that there are far too may buttons in the world…..and worse, they’re gaining in number and decreasing in size every day. Take the task of writing out this rant for example. My laptop alone (and I got the thinnest, lightest, most streamline one I could find) has 145 button options (excluding resettable ones) and the Word template has at least 65 buttons showing, but that's deceptive. They’re mostly all drop down menus with countless more buttons and sub buttons. Add to that the hidden buttons (who knows how many of them there are?) and what it will ultimately take to save and post this on “face” book {insert note: facebook seems to not allow more than 4 lines of text or text attachements - must be a technological limitation}, and I figure I am looking at close to three to five hundred button options to choose from. Hey, buttons work, but they don’t give you much of a workout. Hammers do.
While were one the subject of technological marvels, what about settings? How do you feel about them? There used to be a joke about setting your VCR (okay, I know I surrender 50% of my argument right there) and for a period of 5 or 6 years when technology was still reliably slow, thousands upon thousands of TV-top VCR’s sat flashing 12:00 A.M to the bane of their owners. Why? Nobody could “set” the damn things…at least not until adults finally relinquished the remotes to their kids.
When I was a kid our first TV remote had ONE button and my dad never gave it up; once we got a VCR (Betamax actually) and the genius couldn’t figure out how to set it, I was King.
When I was a kid our first TV remote had ONE button and my dad never gave it up; once we got a VCR (Betamax actually) and the genius couldn’t figure out how to set it, I was King.
At 10, I had all the time in the world to cipher a shiny, new gizmo. I also had fifteen acres of land to get lost in everyday and 99 days out of every sunny hundred, my mother would have to call me home at dark with a dinner bell. The bell, it had only two moving parts: the clangor and her arm.
Today, there must be about a hundred million moving parts and settings to deal with all activated by buttons, clicks, switches and thankfully once in a while, a lever. (You can generally trust a lever, especially when gravity is in your favor.) Buttons however often leave no trace of having been effected. I’ll agree that in most cases buttons do their buttony little jobs - sans dust, sans spills, but who can deny the errant tap or incidental click? How many times has that benign, faultless error sent technology into a tizzy? I can think of at least two PC repairs and a half dozen e-mails I’d personally like to have back.
I guess after all I might be somewhat of a Luddite – if what it means is doing more things by hand, meeting more people face to face and taking a little more time with things, especially when considering which buttons I push. Have a nice day – I’m out the door.
p.s. – if there was some button or click I could have hit to post this more efficiently, by all means, let me know. And, don’t worry I wont tell anyone it was you, Emily, who said I was still lost in the stone age!
