Often I am asked where I find the subjects for my column. Of course, my answers vary – sometimes I am prompted by news items in the daily paper, sometimes by personal likes and dislikes, sometimes by validation of what I’m already experiencing. Today I am prompted by the funny papers, which I always read but am seldom inspired by.
Today I am sitting down to write my monthly column – the first since I stupidly accepted Microsoft’s offer for a free upgrade to Windows 10. I’d had Windows XP for years, and loved it. I was competent in the use of it. It did all that I needed to have done and then some.
I know in my heart that free offers are rarely free – there’s always a catch. I hang up immediately when the voice on the telephone says, “Congratulations! You’ve won...” I always look to see if my subscription purchases carry an automatic renewal, and I don’t accept the bait.
Where was my mind when I got those repeated offers of a free up-grade to Windows 10? I accepted it! Now it takes me five times as long to find my apps and my saved items, in addition to repeated offers for replacement for programs I was proficient in and satisfied with. This was already in my mind when I read “Pickles” in the morning comics, in which the elderly lady of the house finds an automatic update on her telephone and expresses all my reactions to upgrades. She also throws her phone around until she breaks it and says, “I think I stopped it now!” Of course I’m not going to bounce my laptop on the floor in frustration; a few bad words and a lot of time will have to suffice, but my feelings already existed before I read “Pickles.”
I was beginning my search for something medical last week, and I went to my aging supply of reference books – I have many, covering numerous subjects. Books have always been my source of information. Suddenly it occurred to me that the computer would tell me what I needed to know faster and more currently than my books, and I felt somewhat angry! Isn’t that strange? I was resentful of my new source for information at the same time I was taking advantage of it.
I tried analyzing my own behavior as I would if a client was relating his ambivalence to me. I grew up before WWII. I’ve reveled in all the new inventions and new ideas that have come along. I was always ahead of my time and I took pride in being. Now my time is being surpassed and I don’t like it. Instead of being proud of being ahead of my time, I want to say, “Stop the world! I want to get off!”
I’d be convinced that it is just me who has changed radically, except that much of my thinking is corroborated in the end-of-the-year broadcasts, by people I consider sages who are decades younger than I am. Maybe the sky IS falling, Chicken Little. cc