Remember calculators? How simple. Even my three score and ten year-old brain could use a calculator without the benefit of a 12-year-old associate offering advice on the sidelines. Naturally, this was B.C. (Before Computers). Then the computer came along and with much difficulty — much cursing — much advice from mocking 12-year-olds who found an activity they loved, besides obnoxiousness and noisemaking — my stressed brain learned to operate the device. So I thought.
Then “they,” the strange pointy-headed people who lived in the woods and emerged to design software, somehow discovered that even I could use 30% of the functions on the computer. No good. They changed it.
Why, oh why, are they obsessed with change? No sooner do I learn X than they change it to Y.
Highly intelligent but aged minds hate change. “Leave it alone,” says the home page of my 15-year-old Mac, to those people who live in the woods.
It all reminds me of the mania to modify a product just to make it different — to stimulate sales, not efficiency. “Hey look, I’ve got the new whatchamacallit – newest model, makes popcorn, too. Bet your iPad or Raspberry can't make popcorn.”
Thank goodness, for the moment, we still live in a capitalist society. Companies like profits, and change is often the engine of profit. That’s OK, just give me a choice. If I don’t need to track the
number of passengers with green shirts flying out of Kennedy, don’t build it into the “M” key on my keyboard. And don’t ring bells and flash green naked women on my screen so I remember to upgrade to this bizarre requirement.
Because of those technical wood nymphs, change becomes religious. It doesn’t always bring improvement, but it does always bring complication. There ought to be two streams of development. The first would be like your car. You bought a 2010 Ford; it remains a 2010 Ford. The accelerator never moves from its floorboard position. The instrument panel still indicates miles per hour, not feet per second. My kind of device. The second would be a test of your mental flexibility. Here, everything changes. The accelerator is now the brake. This is for users who like puzzles and are intrigued by how the device operates, not by what it does.
But in the computer world, even if you stick with the same computer, it’s always bugging you to update this or that. And it has clever little tricks. While you’re playing tennis, it swaps out your operating system so you have to call that smart aleck 12-year-old just to send an email. This is a world that worships change — for better or worse.
My pet remembrance of the “fix it even if it ain’t broke” philosophy is the battery-powered watch. Yep, I’m convinced that’s when it all started — a pivotal date in the history of uselessness. Now, I’m not a watchmaker, but batteries cost money and add an item to your “to do” list. And I swear they’re dying sooner and sooner. How long will it be before it’s a daily ritual? And few stores will change a battery.
How hard was it in the old days to give that little stem a few twists? Free twists, I might add. Think about it.
Gotta go now — my computer is groaning, which means that if I don’t install the popcorn app, it’ll erase my files of all stories that contain the word “popcorn."
