You know... this guy:
"In MY day, we didn't have your fancy-schmancy iPhone. We had an earwax yellow phone, with a wheel on it! And you had to turn the wheel 7 seven times to call someone! You know why you had to turn it 7 times? Because in my day we didn't have area codes! We all lived in one damn area code, And WE LIKED IT!"
I catch moments like this more and more lately, especially being around the littler ones in the family, with their iPods and iTouches and iWhatevers. One of them has a Kindle. I can't even deal with that idea.
So this morning, I purchase some movie tickets (over the internet, of COURSE, who buys tickets AT a theater anymore!?). Within just a second of clicking "submit" I received a text message with a link to a barcode. I show up at the theater (or "picture show") later this evening, hold up my phone for them to scan the barcode, and then I go on in to my PRE-SELECTED seat and view the movie.
I mean, "talkie".
Where was this in "my day"? Back then, you know, when I rode the CDA (Chicago Dinosaur Authority) to see a movie, and had to transfer at Harlem Dirt Road (we didn't have avenues yet) to get there. And then once we did get there, we had to wait in line - outside, mind you, no indoor box offices in my day! - and purchase tickets. At the concession stand, popcorn was only $6.50 for a small! You had to wait until you were inside the theater and find available seats. If you got there late, TOO BAD FOR YOU, you were sitting in the front because you needed the light from the screen to find an empty seat, lest you end up giving someone an impromptu lap dance.
Now?
Now, you can view the seating plan online and pick your seats ahead of time. You can bypass the indoor box office, proceed to the concession counter, mortgage your home for some popcorn and sell your car if you wish to have a beverage, and go right to the seat that you want. If some creep is in the seat you want, you have every right to tell him to move it or lose it, becuase you have a ticket that you purchased 10 hours beforehand that states that seat F7 is YOURS.
This very blog is even a testament to the change of times. When I comeplete this (and edit it 50 times - we didn't have this new-fangled OCD in my day either... you hand-wrote everything ONCE and moved on with your day), I will post it on Facebook, as always.
If this were way back yonder in the calendar, I would have to grow up, overcome fear of speaking in front of people and stage fright, develop a career as a stand up comic, get on the Tonight Show (...with Johnny Carson, by god! In my day with have that "Jay Leno". And we really DID like it!), deliever this material to you, get sued by Dana Carvey for stealing his act, and end up broke. That seems like a lot of work. But thanks to technology, and Al Gore, I can post this on Facebook with one click and Dana Carvey will never know about it because he isn't my Facebook friend (Want to know why? Because I saw "Master of Disguise" and I am surprised he has any friends left).
Also, I managed to coordinate a movie outing with two other people without exchanging a single word. It took 4 text messages and a couple of clicks online, all in under 10 minutes.
In 1986, that would have taken 4 days.
So tonight we're going to see "Ted", with Mark Wahlberg and Seth MacFarlane. Ted is a foul-mouthed drunken computer-animated teddy bear. We didn't have that in my day! We had E.T.
E.T. was played by a real person. If they made that movie today, E.T. would be a pile of pixels voiced by Ashton Kutcher. There were real people in the Howard the Duck suit too. Today, Howard the Duck would be a pile of pixels voiced by... well... Ashton Kutcher.
I don't mind Seth MacFarlane, but come on, even if you want to use his voice, at least throw Warwick Davis in a teddy bear suit. I'm paying good money here.
I've written about things like this before, the whole "in my day" theme, (see A, B, Start, Select, Up, Down ), but the more things change (by which I mean the older I get), the more it amazes me how we got along just fine without the "conveniences" we have now.
Example. About two weeks ago I had a call come in at work, an older gent, wanting a meeting room. So I says to him, "no problem", I says. Well, seems his group needed to conference call with two other folks in other states. Seems reasonable, yes, sir, we can help you with that. He asks me if there is a way we can set up a TV with live video conferencing ability to these two other states. First of all, this isn't the NBC Newsroom and we're not trying to talk to our correspondant in Jalalabad. It's a freakin' hotel, and I have never heard of anyone wishing to 3-way live-video-conference via television set in a hotel meeting room before.
I told him to download Skype.
(No, seriously, I did)
This is one of my favorite things to both laugh at and be annoyed that I didn't have... two of my nieces, when away from their mother, will actually sent text messages to said mother with complaints and tattles. * buzz buzz * * tap * * select * * read * "Mom, she won't feed the dogs!"
This is both hilarious and grossly unfair.
In my day, I had to get up and walk around, sometimes all the way down the block to the neighbors' houses, and actually locate my mother or father in order to whine about something my sister was or was not doing. These kids today don't even have to move more than a finger to annoy their parents and they don't even need to be anywhere near them. Hell, they don't even need to make a sound! I always thought I was a grade-A whiner because I could take a one-syllable word and stretch it into a paragraph. These lazy little punks can whine without even making noise! (granted, I'm in favor of that, but still...)
I sense that one day, I will have a kid whining at me that she has to THINK in order to activate the television/satellite/cell phone microchip in her head in order to make a call and that it's too much work.
And I'm going to hear myself saying "Oh shut up. I have had to do everything you can imagine to make phone calls. There was a time we had to use our finger to TAP THE SCREEN." And she's going to look at me in horror.
Then she's going to close her eyes, think real hard, activate her instant brain message chip, and send a message to my chip to tell me that her brother is bothering her.
Boy, did Robert Zemeckis have the wrong idea of what 2015 will be. If ONLY hoverboards were real and it wasn't so taxing to have to tap a small rectangle to call someone.
