My love-hate relationship with technology is tilting more toward hate these days.
I realize that as a journalist I should be grateful for what technology has brought to my profession. Information once only available through visits to libraries and deep digs into reference books now may be obtained in seconds or minutes via Google.
Innovations in technology certainly have improved the world as far as medical care, transportation, manufacturing, video games – you name it. Other than someone who lives off the grid in a cave, most of our lives are affected greatly by technology.
That said, virtually every day I wish we could go back to simpler times.
Is there a worse feeling than seeing a dashboard warning light activated in your vehicle? I’d almost rather suffer a nonfatal wound than spot any dashboard warning light, knowing it likely is going to cost me money. A few days ago, two different warning lights lit up on the dashboard of one of our cars. It made me sick to my stomach.
Not that turning back the clock would help me when it comes to auto repairs. Anything beyond checking the oil is beyond me.
My friend Joe, on the other hand, liked to tinker with cars. Joe could look over a vehicle owner’s manual, check out your car’s problem and usually take care of it in a few hours. He was unbelievable.
When he was in the Army, Joe bought a broken-down car for about $5 from a fellow soldier and turned it into his off-hours project. He haunted junkyards for parts and after a couple of months, he had the thing running.
That was about 40 years ago. Working on cars is a whole new animal today.
As vehicle manufacturers turned more and more to computerization, they moved beyond my pal’s ability to work on them.
I truly miss hand-crank car windows. The last car I had with them was a Saturn sedan that I bought in the late 1990s. It was a demo model with 5,000 miles on it and it was one of the few vehicles on the lot without power windows.
Earlier in that decade, I’d bought a used car that had power windows. Neat, I thought. Until about a month later, when whatever enabled the windows to go up and down went on the fritz while they were in the up position. A short time later, the air conditioning followed suit. The broiling part of summer left me with no air conditioning and no way to lower the windows to at least get a breeze in the car. It was brutal.
I also despise modern office automated phone systems. When I make a call, a person should be on the other end to answer. I do not want to hear multiple options, which apparently are always changing. I don’t want information on how I could go online to get my question answered (almost always a lie). I want to speak with a human being.
Getting back to journalism, when I got my first job in the profession in October 1984 at the Louisiana Press-Journal (about 30 miles south of Hannibal), we pasted up the pages on boards using hot wax. A layout artist would manually cut out the printed material and fit the pieces on a page like a jigsaw puzzle.
The writers and editors used computers, but those computers were basically word processors. We had no internet because there was no internet.
Danger existed in this process. Once, I dropped a piece of paper behind the waxing machine. I thought I could lean the waxer just enough to reach the piece of paper. Instead, hot wax spilled out of the machine and onto my pants and shoes, ruining them.
The hot wax didn’t feel so good, either.
Today, there is little chance of me spilling hot wax on my pants at the office, but technology has brought about other headaches.
For years, it has been common in newsrooms to hear an editor yell “Save your stories!” on the computers during a storm, meaning you should periodically strike the computer’s Save key. Even a split-second power surge can wipe out a story you’ve worked on, so the advice is heeded.
There are times when either the computers or the internet do not work correctly, even under clear skies, making the lives of those of us trying to fill a paper miserable.
In the old days, putting a newspaper together was a more arduous process, but as long as there was no prolonged power outage, you knew you’d be able to go to press.
Don’t get me started on social media. Yes, there may be more information available at your fingertips than at any time in history. There’s also more misinformation readily available. Sometimes, it’s inadvertent, but other times, someone is purposely spewing lies.
I quickly tire of online political opinions. If you were to look at my personal comments or the posts of others I pass along, you’ll find almost everything attached to my name is either sports-related or intended as humor.
Still, I have lost track of the number of occasions when someone has hijacked my innocuous post and started a strand of toxic comments. To those who do this, thanks a bunch for tying me to your ridiculous views.
While I do appreciate what technology has done for society, I don’t think I would have minded being born in say, 1900, rather than in 1962.
Except for the wax dripping from the candles.
