Sticks and Stones

Consider the happy state of the caveman. There he is chipping away at a flint with a rock in order to achieve a sharp edge; or he is squatting in his cave scratching in the dirt with a stick. 

Envy him.

If his stick breaks, he goes to the nearest tree, breaks off a branch, and is ready to continue his attempt at quadratic equations or the image of a mastodon. Is the second stick thicker than the first? No problem. There is no hardware issue here—no compatibility hassle. His simple equipment, we might say, works straight out of the box. 

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I offer these thoughts based on insight gleaned from purchasing a new computer. There was actually no need for me to whip out my credit card, but I had been grousing about the seeming slowing of speed of my previous MacBook Air, and, so when I discovered that I could get a new one for 20% off, I jumped. 

Thanks to Amazon’s one-day delivery, there it was: spanking new in a dark gray slim silhouette. To demonstrate my adult restraint, I actually waited several hours before opening the box and started to call it into action.

The first thing I discovered was that the power cord of the old Mac did not work with the new one; the new Mac has completely different inputs. Not only the power input was incompatible with the new machine, but also, with the elimination of the USB slots, everything that plugged into the old Mac was useless on the new. Goodbye, wireless mouse; goodbye, external hard drive; goodbye, external disc drives; goodbye, scanner.

Hello, Amazon, send me a Bluetooth mouse.

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It is not just with computers that the modern world has deemed it necessary to make upgrades the bane of one’s existence. 

I have been leasing the same make and model automobile through several iterations. It used to be that the music system had a six CD player. How wonderful! You could drive for hours and have new sounds accompanying you all the way. But the two most recent models have scrapped the six CD player and now offer a single measly slot to fill. This is bad for two reasons:

First: Have you ever gone on a trip with one music source on hand? In Argentina once, we borrowed the car of my son-in-law’s brother for a journey to the countryside. The car had a cassette player, but unfortunately there was only one cassette on hand to listen to. Have you ever tried listening to Rod Stewart in a car for two hours straight? The definition of Hell on Wheels.

Second: You’re driving on the Turnpike at sixty miles an hour. The CD in the single slot comes to an end. You would like to listen to something new, so what do you have to do? At sixty miles an hour (and assuming that you prefer to keep your eyes on the road) you fumble for the tiny ejector button, and, with any success, you remove the disc and place it on the passenger’s seat. Then you attempt to maneuver the center console open and extract a new disc. With one hand on the wheel, you lever open the disc’s case, remove the disc, and attempt to place it right side up into the narrow CD slot. If the next sounds that accompany you on your journey are not from Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata, you are still alive. 

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Then there’s my dishwasher. (I will not dwell on the arduous adventure of getting the previous super to install it. Actually, he never did.) I cannot figure out how to load it. The spaces seem all wrong. And although the capacity looks greater than the old dishwasher’s, somehow there’s always less of a load when filled.

But that’s not my real complaint. The old dishwasher (by the same manufacturer, incidentally) had its controls on the outside of the machine. The new one has the controls (electronic, not mechanical) inside on the top of the front lid. Which means that when you open the lid, there’s a good chance that you will accidentally land a finger on the start button—and the machine sputters to life, spraying water all over the interior. It happened to me twice this week.

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In conclusion, can we really say that the modern world—with the agita of dealing with modern technology—is an upgrade from the simple world of the caveman?

(And in case you need more proof: as I was going to transfer the text from Pages to my blog, the internet connection went down.)