My son was on the computer the other night, trying to get into a website he wanted to access. I helped him enter the pertinent information to send away for a password which would allow him to get where he wanted to go. The password, we were informed, would be e-mailed to us.
So the e-mail search was on. After about two checks in one minute, and nothing appearing, I could see frustration clouding his brow. A few more checks, more frustration still. I decided to help him, and set my e-mail program to check my messages every 60 seconds and to ring a bell if a new e-mail came in. A half hour passed, and nothing arrived. What was going on?
It was then, naturally, time for one of those talks whereby I pass a tale or two along about how things were when I was his age.
“My friend Jim and I used to send away corn syrup can coupons for black and white photos of our NHL hockey heroes and we would have to wait weeks for them to arrive,” I said, in my best old-guy-reminiscing voice. “Every day we’d check our mailboxes and finally, they’d arrive in a brown paper envelope and we’d be so excited.”
I looked in the direction of my son and could see a look on his face that suggested he might have more easily understood me had I just explained the Pythagorean Theorem to him backwards. Wait weeks for something? Huh?
I regale my family, too, when we are looking at digital photos two seconds after they’ve been taken, with stories about the old days when we would send our rolls of film to some place in the town of Clinton, an hour’s drive away, and the finished photos would arrive weeks later. Weeks. And we didn’t think that was out of place. Something that complicated like making photos would have to take weeks. Wouldn’t it?
When my kids use their mother’s tiny cellphone, I am reminded of my days on the farm, ringing the big black phone mounted on a brown wooden plate on the wall. Two long rings and one short one, as I recall, was a sign the call was for us. All the other rings for the four or five other homes on our “party line” rang too and sometimes you’d jump for the receiver, but stop when you counted the rings and realize it wasn’t for you.
But that process, to my parents, must have seemed like rocket science. They were born in farmhouses without hydro, running water, or central heat. No phones. In their earliest days, no radios. No cars. And I suppose that their parents thought of their kids, even then, as living in a foreign, modern age, what with Victrolas, movies and Model T’s just around the corner.
The one thing all this steady progression of technological change has had in common is speed. We seem to be going ever faster and faster. I doubt that’s a bad thing; it just is. We can’t have cures for cancer and face transplants some day without accepting all the other paraphernalia the incredible human mind can devise. Cellphones have cost some people their lives, but how many have they saved?
But good, bad or otherwise, I can’t help but wonder where things can possibly go from here. What devices will 10-year-old boys be playing with a hundred years from now and how fast will those things go? How about a thousand years from now?
In 10,000 years, will we be back living in caves and bonking each other on the heads with clubs or heading down to the newest coffee shop on Mars for a cold tumbler of lemonade?
On the other hand, it’s nice to know change doesn’t always happen that quickly. After watching Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones bouncing around at the Super Bowl half-time stage on Sunday, I said to my son, thinking I was making a neat connection, “You know, I wasn’t much older than you when I first saw that guy on the Ed Sullivan Show.”
“But Dad, why does he look so old?”
Huh?
I didn’t think he looked that old.
©2006 Jim Hagarty
