By Louis A. Zona
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – When it comes to handling a computer, I would have to be classified as not very technical but decent.
Did I really say that? The truth is that I’d be thrilled to throw my computer into the nearest dumpster.
But what really gets me is social media, which is both good and bad. How often have you read that a teenager has taken his or her own life after being bullied by another teen?
As far as I’m concerned, life would be so much better if social media never existed. While on vacation a few years ago, I was in a beautiful restaurant where I saw a mother and her three daughters all on their cell phones. I imagined that the four of them were texting friends, watching TikTok videos, etc., while not even looking at each other. I think that family might eventually be classified as dysfunctional. Did I tell you that all four never spoke to each other at all during that dinner?
Have you seen the videos of people walking while texting and not noticing that they were heading directly into a fountain, car, hole or pole?
I guess that I might be blessed after all by not clinging to my cell phone. Friends laugh when I tell them that my cell phone is just a telephone. The only thing that it is good for is its use as a phone.
I probably should not be so hard on myself since I do have certain accomplishments when it comes to technology and not just understanding how an electric train works.
Speaking of electric trains, I loved my train when I was a kid.
As I recall, there were two companies that manufactured electric trains: Lionel and American Flyer. I owned an American Flyer which was not as sturdy as the Lionel but was more realistic. The American Flyer had tracks of two rails while the Lionel was less realistic with its three railed tracks. My train also acted like a steam engine with smoke coming out of its stack. But Lionel is the winning train because of its heavier nature.
Speaking of personal technology, I’ll never forget the Christmas when my dad gave me a portable radio as a present. It was one of the very first battery powered transistor radios, and my dad was excited to tell me about the workings of that radio. There’s a picture in a scrapbook of me and friends at Cascade Amusement Park and I am holding my radio with ear plugs listening to a baseball game. That was me for sure, holding that radio which I still own and enjoy – a gift from the 1950s.
Another great Christmas present was an electric typewriter that I enjoyed as much as that American Flyer. Since I did not take typing in my high school class, I spent a summer teaching myself how to type.
Other technology over my lifetime included one of the very first electric football games. It featured a vibrating field that caused the players to move in any direction. There was even a kicker. As I think about that game, back when I was a teenager, it clearly was not perfected. It looked great but functioned poorly.
The greatest piece of technology that I received after my high school years was my brother-in-law’s Chevrolet Bel Air. The nice thing about that car was that anyone, including me, could give the car a tune up – which basically was changing the spark plugs. The downside of owning that car was that it had a stick shift – although that prevented it from being stolen since few people were able to handle a stick.
Thank goodness for my brother, Jerry, who taught me how to drive a manual transmission years before. Because of him, I thought that driving the standard transmission car was very easy.
The funniest episode related to technology was the vacuum cleaner that my dad caught while fishing. He was clever enough to fix it up for my mom, who used it for many years.
I’ve never been able to manage using an electric shaver. For some reason, using small electrical appliances reminds me of an episode from “The Twilight Zone” in which all the appliances attack a person in his home.
Getting back to the topic of radio, a broadcaster by the name of Arthur Godfrey eventually transformed radio to a more personal format that is still used today by some hosts.
In the category of “not so bright” technology, I’d have to include my very first electronic word processor, which was terrific until you happen to be near a power plant. Everything that you saved on it would be lost to magnetism from the plant. For sure I wanted to throw that thing in the Ohio River or the nearest body of water.
The advancement of the flatscreen TV has met new challenges. I guess I’ll never be able to turn that sucker on and off. It’s almost as bad as the controls in my new Subaru. The dashboard is so complicated in that car that I’d like to take a hammer to the darn thing.
When you reach for the dashboard screen while driving it, you never know what you’re touching. You might get heated seats instead of air conditioning.
It is all too much to ask from a technologically challenged guy. Now where’s my vacuum cleaner?