Catching up with the Times

I’ve always been a little late to the technology party, a little reluctant to move with the times. Not so my husband – he was always excited with each new advancement, keen to jump right in.

We were one of the first families with a video camera (it had several components but if you were strong enough to swing a VHS player over your shoulder and lift the camera and keep from getting tangled in the miles of wire and keep your balance you could record action shots of your children while trying to keep up with and tabs on them).

I lived in a house with three little children, one big one and every new gadget the world had to offer.

We had a computer when you still had to load DOS before dialing up.

When the first cell phones were being installed in fancy cars my husband had his mounted in a brief case so he could move it from pickup truck to minivan. His version rivaled the video camera for tricky components (he had to plug the power cord into the cigarette lighter, place a magnetic aerial on the roof of the car, thread the attached wire through a crack in the window and find a spot to place the briefcase so the phone was within reach). He was way ahead of the curve as far as mobility went – we could phone people from the car as long as there was a cell station near by.

My excitement about technology stalled somewhere between then and WiFi.

I purchased a smart TV for my new place and have discovered it’s a lot smarter than I am. I’m used to the multi clicker experience when watching television. I felt brilliant the day I learned HDMI 1 ran the channels and 2 the DVD player. When the kids added the little Apple box thing into the mix I was back to square one. This new TV does all the things with one clicker – it should be less confusing but it’s not.

I had a crash course on operating the new clicker from my younger daughter – she went home after a couple of hours leaving me more confident but still logged into Disney Plus. I was too embarrassed to call her right away to ask how to get back to CBC so I floated around Disney for a while. I decided to find out what all the hype around high definition television was. I searched the menu for the high-tech-iest movie I could think of and settled on Star Wars – A New Hope (filmed in 1977). The picture was indeed highly defined – R2D2 and C-3PO just about jumped off the screen. The experience was both high tech and like going home in one fell swoop – I’d missed those 2 little droids, they took me back to simpler times.

I really stepped into the future this past weekend – I bought an Alexa on Amazon.ca (typing that sentence gives me a bit of a thrill – maybe I’ve caught up with the times). My elder daughter got me set up. She introduced me to ‘the voice’ and taught me how to play Simon Says with artificial intelligence. She was barely up the stairs when I issued my first command.

Alexa. Play “Remember When”.