I’ve talked before about technology and how lucky we are to have the tools that we do. I try to be thankful for the amazing tech all around me and everything that it simplifies in my life. However, sometimes I find that part of me expects for everything in life to be as simple as some things concerning technology. In short, technology has spoiled me.
Like most people, I find that I lose my phone on a regular basis. It isn’t that often, actually, because it’s almost always with me or sitting next to my spot on the couch. However, I have gotten used to calling my phone to find it whenever I lose it, and the idea that if I ever did lose it, finding it would only take the push of a few buttons. I’ve begun to expect that everything should have this kind of a function.
So, when I lose, say, a book, I will half-heartedly search. I’ll glance around to see if it’s just laying somewhere obvious, and then I stop. Part of me expects that I can just call it or something to find it. And then I remember that my book is not a phone, and I can’t just call a book to see where it is. It’s quite disappointing. Worse than that, though, is when I try to use the “undo” button in real life.
I love to write. If I’m not writing an article, I’m writing a story or brainstorming character biographies and plot lines. I have gotten used to simply hitting the little back arrow in the top left corner of my toolbar on Google Docs whenever I make a mistake. Sometimes I find myself doing the same thing in real life. It happens most commonly when I do something stupid that only takes a second to commit, but will be complicated and time consuming to fix.
An example of this would be when I was taking care of a neighbor’s dog. As I was setting down her food dish, my klutz-brain glitched and basically threw the dish onto the ground. I stared at the mess for a few seconds, subconsciously searching for an “undo” button so that I wouldn’t have to spend the next fifteen minutes painstakingly picking up pieces of dog food off the floor. As you can imagine, no such resolution came to me.
I guess I’ve just gotten used to these constants in my technological life, and I’ve started to expect them to help me in other aspects. I mean, I still understand that I can’t call my book when I lose it, and there is no such thing as an “undo” button in real life, but that part of me wants things to be as simple as they can be when technology is involved. However, until technology has caught up with me, and you can find everything by calling it and there’s a universal “undo” button that can fix all of life’s mistakes, I’ll just have to deal with doing things the old-fashioned way. See you next week!