We’ve talked tech before. I’ve even admitted that I’m fine with many of the advancing technologies we have and continue to come up with, but there are a couple things I wish we hadn’t invented. Or at least not gone for in such a big way.

This really all started with a conversation I had with my daughter, a not quite 30 year old who makes her living only because we have tech-evolved as much as we have yet still hangs on to these few things from my past.

PDA devices and apps versus planners/calendars.

Planners are called planners because that’s what they do. They plan. Or help you plan.

This is what started our conversation. When I was discharged from the hospital I was sent on my way with home nursing and physical and occupational therapies. I had gotten off the phone with one of the home care givers and trying to sort out who was coming when. I had everybody’s visits, along with doctors’ appointments and dialysis sessions loaded into my electronic scheduler and that synced with my Amazon Echo to remind me each morning what was happening that day. (I told you I was okay with some new tech.) But it was only after I opened the actual calendar looking page of the calendar wannabe program did I realize that I had all three disciplines coming the same day and a total of 5 commitments over two days. My “assistant” gladly accepted the suggested dates and times knowing there were not overlaps but didn’t warn me of not only adjacent scheduling but of overwhelming (for me) scheduling. My daughter reminded me if I just used a book style planner or at least a page out of a calendar I could have seen at a glance that I was getting in too deep for the middle of the week. I would have sent her to bed without her supper but it is her house and she was cooking.

The point is, there are some things a calendar does better than all the electronic schedulers out there. Hung on a wall with nice big squares for each day, a calendar is still the best guarantee to efficient planning.

GPS versus an atlas or paper maps

No argument that for getting from Point A to Point B celestial guidance is the way to go. But when you want to know just where those points are in this great big world or what’s at Point A1, A2, and so forth, start unfolding that paper.

Anybody who uses GPS for directions for any appreciable time will run into problems. By problems I mean lost. Undocumented construction, flooded roads, accident clean up crews, or over height semis wedged in tunnel entrances or under overpasses turn Little Miss Turn By Turn into a one phrase wonder – recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.

Am I the only one who wonders after making a turn and hearing “travel north for 8 and 1/2 miles” to the next turn what I’m missing in those 8 and 1/2 miles? The on screen “map” clearly displays the traveled road in all its exact scale-ness but nothing around it. No town names, no points of interest, no “world’s largest ball of twine!” a mere hope skip, and jump at the third intersection to the right.

There is no better way to getting un-lost than to pull out an old fashioned map and see what landmarks are nearby or road names or route numbers that look familiar. Those same maps display a bounty of options that go around those unexpected obstacles. Only with maps can you take in the whole picture of the places around you.

Keep that GPS app on your phone. It has its place. This is a big country connected by oodles of 8 and 1/2 mile stretches. Some of them are pretty interesting places but sometimes you have to get off the the highlighted route to find them.

Music downloads versus LPs, CDs, even cassette tapes

I get it. You like a song, you want a song, you buy a song. No muss, no fuss, no waste. And no experimenting with songs from a the B Side. Not to mention all the great stuff on an album that never gets air time…if you can still call where they play “air.”

Beyond the songs that go unheard are the stories you found on the printed material – the album jackets and the CD inserts. If the songs of an album told a story, the liner notes painted the picture. Sometimes with a collage of real pictures. (You remember pictures. They are those things you call “images” but you don’t need a phone to see.) Often the notes even included the lyrics so there was never an excuse for belting out “Welcome to the land of flaming sex!” at a red light.

News sites verses newspapers

Printing material is expensive. Delivering printed material is expensive. Recycling printed material is sometimes more work than I really care to do. Still I’d rather pay for and read a paper held in my hands (on spread across the table) than read an article on line. Why?

I’m not so stuck in the old ways that I’ll say I prefer a real paper because “I like the feel of it in my hands” although that argument might work with books. I prefer the paper because I get more news out of it. Think of this. You get your “paper” on line probably through an morning email that says today’s “paper” is out there along with a handful of headlines with the articles’ first few sentences. So you scan those, see a few that are interesting and check them out. You read that one article led by whomever wrote the morning email and you click your way back to the email to maybe read one or two more in the came fashion. If you see that same headline on hard copy, you notice it, you read it, you follow the article to its “continued on page,” where you notice another headline or maybe a picture that looks interesting or complements the article you just finished. You read that one and the pattern continues. Soon you are turning pages, reading commentaries, arguing with letters to the editor, laughing at the comics, not believing the comeback the home team made in the 11th inning.

People who says “I can get all the news on line” might but never really do. What news they read is often because somebody else decided that was the news they should read.

 

So there you have it. My wishes for things that wouldn’t go away. Not because I’m old and set in my ways even though I am old and can be set in my ways, but because they are just plain better. Because I say so is why. Sheesh. Kids today!