Slowing catching up to technology
When my husband and I picked out the location to build our home in 24 years ago, the top consideration for me was the school district we’d fall in.
Next came proximity to the wharf for my husband who is a lobster fisherman and has to travel back and forth late at night or early in the morning on snowy and icy roads in the winter.
Coming in third was the distance to town for me.
Those were my three top priorities.
When I became the mother of a teenager 20 years later who got his beginners driver’s licence, I questioned why I hadn’t taken into account the curves in our road or the deep ditches along parts of the drive when deciding where to live.
This past weekend I thought to myself that had I been able to look into the future, the internet would have been another consideration. I’m guessing that internet service is something many people take into consideration now when buying or building a house.
Where I live in Melbourne our ‘high-speed’ internet seems anything but. Things at work that would take 15 or 20 seconds sometimes take in upwards of 20 minutes at home. Multiple that by 20 tasks related to work on a weekend when I’d rather be at home and not have to drive to the office and it becomes even more frustrating. I have little patience for watching the connecting wheel spin and spin and spin.
At Christmas time I had ordered some photo books for my family. I’d wait two hours for the book to upload only to have the internet time out when it got to 99 per cent loaded. When I uploaded the same photo book at a friend’s house in town the upload took under a minute. I couldn’t believe the comparison.
I know, there are much worse and serious problems in life. I have my health and for that I’m grateful.
Still, slow internet is a drag. And who knew our family motto from 2010 to 2018 would be, “You’re lagging me.”
To take my mind off of my technology woes, from time to time I think back to technology from when I was a teenager or just starting out in my journalism career.
Remember those printers where you’d have the line up the dots at the edges of the paper with the dots on the printer. That was fun.
I thought my family had come of age when we finally got a VCR with a remote control. It wasn’t overly convenient that the remote was attached to the VCR with a 10-foot cord, espcially if you were sitting on a couch 12 feet from the TV. On the other hand, you could always find the remote . . . unless you lost the VCR with it.
Nowadays the rave is about Netflix. But remember way back – even further back than DVD rentals – when the rave was renting VHS movies to play in VCRs. I’m not sure which was scarier – the movies or the fear of being charged an extra fee if you didn’t rewind the movie when returning it.
The video games we played were stressful in that they mostly just got faster and faster and faster until you died on screen.
Liquid Paper to cover up a mistake was often gooey, or a driedup hardened glob that you could barely run a Bic ballpoint pen through.
And forget Snap Chat, we had party lines! Although having to wait your turn to use the phone in your house because someone else was already on the line wasn’t much fun. And it didn’t get any more fun as you’d try to quietly pick up the line another 15 times during that person’s conversation to see if the line was free.
So I guess the next time I lament about how slow my internet works I’ll remind myself of other technology and how far we’ve come.
After all, remember dial- up internet?