By Neal Wooten
The year is 2023. How did that happen? As a child of the 70s, I still think of the year 2000 as the distant future. In the fourth grade, back in 1976, our teacher asked us to predict what the year 2000 would be like. Of course, like most movies back then, we were way off as we imagined flying cars, interstellar travel, and colonies on other planets.
Okay, so we’re not exactly the Jetsons yet. We’re not actually living in the technological wonderland envisioned by filmmakers from half a century ago. We haven’t achieved a utopia of world peace, and thankfully, we also haven’t reduced the planet to a dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland. But, for a guy like me who remembers turning the antenna just to pick up three channels, our world is still confusing enough.
I bought Granny a microwave back in the early 80s, and she thought it was voodoo. I would come to visit, and she still cooked everything in two inches of lard on her stove. One day she handed me a huge bag of cheese puffs. I bit into one and it was so stale I couldn’t chew through it. Granny poured some in a bowl and put it in the microwave for ten seconds, and viola, they were crunchy like new. That’s all she ever used the microwave for.
That’s how I feel with most things today. Every time I ask for more deposit slips at the bank, the tellers kind of giggle and try to find where they keep those archaic paper things. I keep dreading the day when my bank informs me they don’t use those anymore, and I’ll be forced to learn whatever the new “normal” way is to make deposits.
Every time I hear, “Just download the app,” I want to slap people upside the head, call them a “little whippersnapper,” and tell them to get the h-e_ _ off my lawn. I’ve never used an app… ever. I was happy just to learn how to text, take pics with my phone, and post them online. And I have no idea what those little square images with the little blocks and designs are, so stop asking me to scan them.
Fifteen years ago, I was ahead of the curve by using backup drives to save my important files instead of using my computer. I’m still doing that, but it’s obsolete. When I save files now, my computer automatically asks if I want to save to the Cloud. I have to click “no” and manually save to my backup drive.
So, 2023 may be here, but I’m stuck in the 70s. And you know what – I’m fine with that.
