One year, I found one of these beauties under the Christmas tree! It provided many hours of inactive entertainment and sore thumbs.
As a child of the 70s I consider myself a first generation home video gamer. We spent many afternoons as teenagers playing games on the primitive predecessors to today’s impressive systems. Christmas each year brought us new ones. At the time they were advanced, but nothing compared to what’s available now.
In those days, we’d spend hours playing Pong, then moved on to Atari and then Intellivision. Classic board games became boring once we got our cramped fingers on hand-held, LED electronic games. I excelled at developing strategies to beat the computer. This was decades before memory cards and pass codes. When you finally succeeded and beat a game, you started from the beginning. There was no saving where you were, to come back to it later.
It wasn’t though until I graduated from college that I got my hands on a real computer. My first jobs were for companies that used less than current office equipment. Whenever possible, I preferred to use an electric typewriter to write memos rather than waste using on an out-of-date computer. Something as simple as correcting a typo meant having to use different screen modes to edit. The process took entirely too much time.
Still though, I was not happy the day I got to the office and found a new Macintosh computer sitting on my desk. I had attempted to use one in the office prior to this and had already decided that I hated it. I had trouble coordinating the mouse. I was clueless to the idea of having different “windows” open and maneuvering between the two. And quite frankly, I didn’t think I’d ever get a grasp on that whole “cut and paste” thing. I hated to “cut” because I feared it was gone forever. After about a week of refusing to even turn the damn thing on, I got up the nerve, opened the manual and taught myself how to use it correctly. Within weeks I was training everyone else on how to use it and trouble-shooting issues over the phone.
Today I don’t considering myself a computer expert, but I’ve learned enough to never be called “computer illiterate.” Since the 80s, I taught myself desktop publishing and as well as countless other programs. I learned to maneuver easily the World Wide Web. These days I rarely visit a mall because I prefer making purchases online. I can’t remember the last time I loaded a roll of film into a camera, and I spend most of my free time on social media and writing a blog.
Why is it then, I am still having so much trouble loading music on my iPad? A few weeks ago, I removed thousands of digital songs from an old computer I was getting ready to give away. That I could do without a problem, but for some reason I could not successfully transfer the music to an iPad. For God’s sake, I’m sure given enough time, a monkey could do it. I had to text message my nephew (another task that I have no problem doing) for help. He tried to give me instructions, but quickly realized it would take far less time to just stop over and show me how. Even after he left it took me several attempts before I hit upon the right sequence of actions to do it.
I still have two early electronic games from when I was a kid. Maniac, came out in 1979 and Milton, a wise-ass talking game, came out in 1980.
I don’t understand how I could come so far with technology yet still get stalled on something so easy. Some days I feel like I’m sitting in high school geometry. I was so lost that even my teacher, Mrs. Kristy didn’t care I spent class time playing my electronic basketball game. Even she knew I’d never have a use for geometry.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Posted in
Humor and Irony,
Memories,
Reflections, Transitions and Thoughts and tagged
aging,
blogging,
humor,
life,
memories,
reflections,
transitions,
truth,
vision |
Sadly, I’ve never really had a hero. Sure there are people I admire, people who do great things in life, but no one I ever thought of as my hero. That was until I read about Pearl Cantrell. Pearl, lives in Texas and is 105 years old. She says bacon is the secret to happiness and a long life. 
To honor Pearl’s birthday, Oscar Mayer delivered cases of bacon in the famous Oscar Mayer Weiner Mobile! She even got to go for a ride in it.
So while others attribute their long lives to eating healthy, exercise and low stress, I think Pearl is on to something. Bacon makes everything better, in fact I can say with certainty, bacon makes me happy. Being happy is also an essential key to longevity. Eating food that tastes like hay, does not make me happy, nor does drinking beverages that look, smell and taste like blended grass.
