As I’m writing, it’s Saturday night. Naturally, I don’t exactly want to sit down and be productive; but, seeing as I haven’t worked at all this weekend, I need to get started. After all, there’s a lot I have to get done. Well, at least there is a silver lining to getting some work done. Instead of just laying down in bed with my laptop (a maxed out late–2013 15” retina MacBook Pro––my pride and joy), I can justify setting up my [battlestation](reddit.com/r/battlestation) (or computer setup, as most would probably call it) at my desk with my beloved [mechanical keyboard](reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards) (a custom modified ten-keyless KUL ES-87 with Cherry MX blue key-switches and blank G20 keycaps––my other pride and joy), my external monitors, ergonomic mouse and custom mouse pad, and of course, my audio setup: Astro A40 headset with––crap–– where’s my MixAmp? I swear I packed it. There’s no way I left without bring it, there’s just no way. How can I work with a suboptimal audio setup? What’s Pink Floyd if you can’t hear all of the background voices and effects?
After lots of frustrating searching, I was forced to conclude I had left my MixAmp at home. Oh well. That’s disappointing, but at the end of the day, I don’t need the best sounding music to get my work done. So I continued setting up, until I realized I also forgot to pack my display port cable. Well, at this point I realize I’m actually screwed because I can’t use my external monitor now. How can I be productive without all that screen real estate?
So, I decided to procrastinate on my work; I’m back in bed with my laptop (although, I am using my keyboard, albeit somewhat awkwardly). Of course, this is just me being lazy, nothing is actually stopping me from working. That said, I think it’s interesting how we develop a dependency for all our tech. Remember how much everyone loved their iPhone 4 when they first got it? Yet, today we’d all consider it torture to downgrade back to it, despite the iPhone 4 being perfectly capable of making phone calls, texts and calling Ubers.
Speaking of Ubers, I have a more concrete example of how we, or at least I, have a dependency on new tech. I was returning to campus after winter break. I was at Islip airport. I had planned to take an Uber back to Stony Brook. That’s when the unthinkable happened: my phone died *gasps*. Two decades ago, almost no one had cell phones, but here I was in the airport with almost no idea of what to do. I ended up walking about a mile, at night, in the snow, to a gas station, where I was able to buy a charger and charge my phone up enough to request an uber. The idea of dealing with this situation without even *having* an iPhone is so foreign to me. In retrospect, I can think of a number of solution to the problem that don’t require having my phone. That said, I still think the airport should replace the “help phones” with chargers. Seriously, I can’t request an Uber with a landline.
I’m guessing most people who lived before the massive mainstream explosion of technology would point to my stories here and say that the dependence my generation has on technology is a bad thing. I don’t think so, however. After all, I did manage to get home that night. Technology is a tool that assists us in our everyday lives. Is the “oldschool” way sometimes better? Sure, and my peers and I should definitely learn to not ignore that solution as frequently as we do. However, I have faith in my generation. Are the old folks trying to tell me that they didn’t get themselves into sticky situations when they were teenagers? Having technology be able to assist us will only make us more efficient at tasks in the long room. Yes mom, I *definitely* printed out my boarding pass, even though that’s a simple waste of paper and time.
No comments:
Post a Comment