Saturday, April 12, 2014

Burned Out

It is really quite amazing how quickly we become dependent upon technology. I would think it has always been so since the very beginning. This fire is good stuff ! Yes, but this wheel I have here is even better than that, and on it goes. I have seen a lot of technological advances so far. I recall when we got color television ! Now that was a big improvement. I remember using a dial type phone for the first time. Just pick it up, wait for the dial tone and dial your number. It was an amazing thing. The dial tone before that I think was Mrs. McGuire, number please. I do know you still had to ask for the long distance operator if you were calling too far away. You couldn't dial all those numbers, now could you ? I have seen the appearance of Mr. Coffee. That was the first automatic drip coffee maker and everybody has one. They go by many names now but I always call them a Mr. Coffee. That is much the same way my Grandmother called a vacuum cleaner a Hoover. Hoover was the first one of those too. The microwave oven was a marvel. At the time it was thought to replace all conventional ovens. Why it could cook a roast in twenty minutes ! The first one my mother had must have weighed fifty pounds ! Now we mostly reheat things in them.
I am not quite up to speed on all the latest technology. I find a lot of it expensive, like that color television Dad bought. There is some of it I really don't see a need for. I think you could say APPS is technology. I do not have a " smart " phone but compared to the one I had on my kitchen wall not many years past, it is a genius ! My television still has a tube in it and I still call the refrigerator an ice box on occasion. I still wear sneakers. I have exposed rolls of film waiting to be developed in the junk drawer. I'm betting not many people under the age of thirty could say that. Do you still buy tin foil ? Maybe you get that new stuff, aluminum foil. I do, tin foil was before my time, old technology.
Isn't it something how when new technology comes out it is so expensive ? Then, in a few years it becomes affordable to everyone. Over time that technology gets replaced by the new. More time passes and that old technology becomes nostalgic. We start to collect it. Before you know it we are paying the same high price for it that we did the first time we had it ! In some cases even more. So we have to have the new, but in the end embrace the old.
Now we hear a lot about hobbies and crafts. Those are the things people used to do to make a living years ago. We do them for fun now. We can pursue those things thanks to technology. All the advances that have been made to ease our burdens. Yes it is technology that allows us to do the things that we used to do because we had to do it, but now we do it just for fun. I guess it wasn't fun when you had to do it and that's why we keep inventing new technology. That sounds right, not many people like doing what they have to do. That is a part of human nature. Let's find an easier way to do this, then we can do it for fun.
Consider this, we will all see the end of the electric light bulb as we now know it. It will soon be a thing of the past. Our children may one day show one to their grandchildren as a curiosity. And they will say, how did this thing work and why did it burn out ? I'm betting that right now someone,somewhere is starting a collection of incandescent lamps. The only question is, will he or she light them up and risk burning them out ? Now that is a dilemma. Just when will the last light bulb burn out ? Will that be a footnote in history ?

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