When I was your age

The other day my five-year-old hacked into her older sister’s iPod, created a video of herself (a “selfie,” I believe the kids call it), and then texted the video to her mother, who was out of town on business.  At my daughter’s age, I could barely operate an Etch-a-Sketch. In terms of “information technology,” I spent my childhood living in a cave wearing the hides of wild animals and played Pong on the Atari I shared with my brothers while we all waited for Steve Jobs to invent fire.  

When my daughter’s stunt was reported to me, my impulse was to launch into one of my rants about how much shit my kids have and technology and blah blah blah. But I checked myself . . . Wait. Who am I kidding? Of course I didn’t check myself. I’m a ranter and ranters gonna rant. You kids think it’s a crisis when you can’t find a wifi connection. You use “skype” and “google” and “text” as if they were verbs. You didn’t even live through that nightmare known as “dial-up.” Back when I was your age, we did not have the Internet or email or Netflix or Facebook or Twitter. YOU KIDS LACK THE CAPACITY TO FATHOM THE CARNIVAL OF HORROR KNOWN AS LIFE WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY THAT I CONFRONTED EVERY SINGLE DAY WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE!

My rant was epic. Then I realized that that the five-year-old had somehow worked the iPhone from my pocket and was playing Doodle Jump while the twelve-year-old was wearing ear buds and listening to music on her iPod. When she eventually noticed me looking at her, she pulled one of the buds out of her ear and said hey old dude, why don’t you go chase some kids off our lawn or something. Her apprenticeship in the dark arts of sarcasm and irony may soon be complete.

The kid has a point, of course. I remember mocking my hopelessly out of touch elders whenever they droned on and on (and on) about how my generation only had to walk to school uphill in the snow one way instead of two. Speaking of my mom, she happened to be at the house the day her granddaughter texted the video. My mom may be sensitive about her age so I’m not going to tell you any more than that she was born in 1942 and is seventy-one years old. I asked her about the biggest changes between her childhood and my childhood. She grew up on a farm in North Dakota. Her family did not have electricity until she was in grade school and no indoor plumbing until after she left home. They had radio, but no television. Her father still used horses for some of the farm work, although he also had a tractor. The days of the working farm horse were numbered and improved technology only hastened the migration from farm to city.

I grew up in rural parts of the Pacific Northwest many years ago. Our household of five shared a single bathroom, but it was indoors and it had hot and cold running water and a toilet that flushed. Our TV picked up only two channels (three if atmospheric conditions were ideal) and my dad was constantly sending one of us boys (the original remote control devices) outside to fiddle with the big antennae attached to the house to improve the signal whenever a football game was on. But we had TV.

Modern technologies and fashions are not by definition good or bad, just different. My twelve-year-old thinks that her kids will view remote control devices as relics if they recognize them at all, since everything will be voice activated for the next generation. I'm already working on the rant I will deliver to my grandchildren as I drone on and on (and on) about how when I was their age, “voice activated” meant my dad yelling at me to get off my ass and change to the other channel and then to grab him a beer from the ice box since I was already up. Because we only had two channels on our TV and we did not have a robot to fetch our beer. And we didn’t ride to schools in solar-powered flying buses.  We had snow when I was your age and we walked to school in it. Up hill. And another thing . . .kids? . . .hello? . . . anybody?