“Yup,” my friend said, “you’re definitely old.”
I’d just delivered a scathing review of a new social networking product he’d asked me to look at. “Why would I write down everything that happened in my day and then blithely send it into the blogosphere?” I asked. “People keep diaries for a reason. They’re private. Why would I send my innermost thoughts to the least private place on earth: the INTERNET?”
He thought about it for a moment. That’s when he pronounced me over-the-hill.
“You don’t live your life on the internet,” he said. “That makes you officially a grumpy old man.”
Usually, I’m flattered when someone calls me a grumpy old man. Writers are supposed to be grumpy. And I’ve always felt young enough that being called “old” was a kind of kinky thrill.
Not anymore. Lately, I’ve been feeling old old, not kinky old.
And let me tell you, old is no fun.
A lot of it has to do with my cell phone. I’m not a big fan of cell phones. In fact, I find them irritating, especially when I see people using them on the road.
Still, even I have to admit that they have their uses, particularly in emergencies. So a few years ago, almost against my will, I started carrying one. I wasn’t very nice to it. In fact, I never learned my own phone number. I carried the thing around with me for one reason, and one reason only: to be used in case of emergency.
Over the years, I broadened the usage a bit. A cell phone made certain things easier. Pick-ups at the airport, for instance. Or calling from Costco to see whether we needed a crate of raw almonds or a new vat of olive oil.
Fine, I thought. The cell phone does have its place. I had a primitive one, with a pay-as-you-go plan that cost me about $60 a year.
That’s right. A year.
It would have cost even less than that, but the company charged me $15 every three months, whether or not I’d used any minutes, just to keep the account active.
For the record, I’ve never sent a text. I’ve never taken a picture with a telephone. I’ve never used a phone to pay a bill, or distill vodka, or split a uranium atom, or any of the other newfangled things people do with their phones these days.
Which apparently makes me a Luddite.
Meanwhile, during the years I was treating my phone like a permanent carbuncle on my leg, a lot of my friends were falling in love with their phones. Some of them preferred Blackberries; others swooned over the iPhone. But their phones were all something mine wasn’t: smart.
Which made mine, by definition, a dumb phone.
I continued to use my dumb phone very sparingly. My friends, on the other hand, found more and more things to do with their smart phones. They played games on them. They checked their email. They got work done. They downloaded “apps,” which meant that they could use their clever little phone to identify songbirds, or level a pinball machine, or even clang like a cowbell when they shook it.
Adorable! Enviable! Expensive!
My phone did have one serious drawback: it didn’t work in Landisburg. So this week, the Olshans finally switched phones. Our cell phones are still more or less dumb ones, although even the dumb ones these days can do an awful lot.
But we’re still economizing on them. So I decided it was time to splurge on one of those fancy Apple products. Not the iPhone, but the iPod Touch, which looks like the iPhone, and does everything the iPhone does, except make calls.
Which means you don’t have to pay AT&T thousands of dollars to use it.
We went to the Apple store, which seemed to be the only business in the mall that had any traffic. In fact, it was packed.
These…children, dressed in casual clothes and carrying around cool Apple devices, sauntered over to offer us help. I felt like telling them I’d been using Apple products since before they were born. But only a crank would say something like that.
For the first time in an Apple store, I actually needed help. My daughter didn’t have any trouble with touchscreens and iPhones and iPods. She’d been exposed to them at school. But I felt like a gorilla with those itty-bitty, shiny gewgaws in my hand.
About ten years ago, when my grandfather was still alive, I brought a computer over to his house, plugged it into the phone jack, and showed him the internet. He’d been asking me about it, and I wanted him to see it firsthand. While he looked over my shoulder, his eyes wide with wonder, I sent an email to California. “That’s going to show up right away!” I told him. “Instantaneous.”
His eyes filled up. He started to cry. Not the reaction I was hoping for. The internet frightened him. “It’s like the whole world coming into my house,” he said.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I have an inkling of what he must have felt. Life was passing him by. The new technology made him feel obsolete, a foreshadowing, perhaps, of a much more final obsolescence to come.
The internet had spoken to him in two words: “old” and “man.”
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 October 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
