When my parents used to say stuff like, “I long for the good old days, when life was simpler,” I would conjure up images of life with no television, one telephone in the house, and egads, no microwave ovens.
Now I find myself saying the same thing, but it means different stuff.
The “good old days” for my generation was when you could figure out remote controls, the fanciest thing about telephones was that they had push buttons, and microwave ovens were the latest convenience for the kitchen.
When they came out with remote controls for televisions, we thought we were all that because we didn’t have to get up and down every time we wanted to change channels. There were five buttons: on/off, channel up, channel down, volume up, and volume down. We thought we were living luxuriously, but as it turns out, life was simple.
We now have three remotes to the “entertainment center” (we don’t even call it just plain old “TV” anymore). One remote controls the digital cable box, one remote controls the DVD receiver thing, and one controls the television.
They all talk to each other, and if you push the wrong button on one, it tells the other two what an idiot you are. The next thing you know you have a multitude of menus on the screen that you will never escape until your remote-control-literate thirteen-year-old comes home.
When the cable guy came to set up the cable box, he sat down with me to give me a “lesson” on how to operate the remote. It looked more like a computer keyboard. When I say “lesson”, I mean it took a good twenty minutes for him to hit the highlights. I was staring at all the buttons, trying to absorb everything he was saying, but forgetting most everything by the time he went onto the next button. I longed for the “good old days”. Back then, I couldn’t figure out how to even reset the clock, and now they have given me a hundred more buttons to contend with.
Telephones are almost as bad. I have this fancy phone with memory-this and memory-that, but since I can’t figure out how to put stuff into the memory, it’s just a phone. If I accidentally push the wrong button, it starts asking me if I want to delete stuff and I get scared and hang up.
My son, also literate in new-fangled-telephone-language, was nice enough to read the inch-thick owner’s manual and input all my often-called numbers into the memory. The only problem now is that I can’t figure how to get them out.
I long for the good old days when you were either talking on the phone or you weren’t. You didn’t have to remember how to use the memory so that you didn’t have to memorize numbers.
My kids tease me about my old microwave oven. Most of us remember the days when having leftovers meant getting one pan dirty for each item you pulled out of the refrigerator, so every time I use the microwave, I thank my lucky stars. Microwave ovens revolutionized the word “leftover”. Now we can heat anything with a touch of the button, and clean-up is a snap.
But apparently, “the touch of a button” wasn’t good enough for the techies, because now they have tons of them. My kids think I need a new one because mine doesn’t do anything fancy. It has two speeds: on and off. For me, that’s all I need. It works, so I don’t see the need for a new one. Besides, if I get a fancy new one with buttons all over the place, I’ll never figure it out.
My son will have to read the manual; he’ll end up being the only “microwave-literate” person in the family.
And I’ll long for the good old days.
