They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To
Life has been quite busy lately and I haven’t written anything in many months. No writing done on my 22 works in progress. No short stories written. No Kindle Vella episodes. And certainly no blog posts. Hell, I have hardly even written Facebook update statuses. So, I told myself today, just write something! Write a measly blog post at least! I went to WordPress to do just that and ended up watching the cursor blink for ten minutes straight. Nothing was coming. I decided to take a look at my drafts folder because I often put some titles of things in there that I might want to write about one day. I saw one with the above title and thought, Yeah, that was going to be a rant about today’s technology. I love a good rant! I shouldn’t have any problem writing in rant mode. I got all worked up and ready to let the fingers fly across the keyboard when I realized that I had already written a rant about this and posted it on Facebook back in September. So, I am going to copy it and paste it here. Except for this paragraph, I still haven’t written anything in several months! I guess a one paragraph rant about posting a previous rant will have to do.
See this thing? It didn’t have a ton of jobs to do. Pretty much only had one job to do. Play radio stations. When you turned it on, that’s what it did EVERY time! Until it didn’t. When it didn’t, that’s what we called broken and it stayed broken until it was fixed. We didn’t reboot it. We didn’t download a patch for it. We didn’t have to reload corrupted software. We had a radio guy fix it, or if you were lucky to know about such things as my dad and I did, we fixed them ourselves. If it was something we knew nothing about, we got it fixed. As a last resort, we bought a new one. Guess what? It worked as soon as we turned it on. No need to run back to the store to get updated parts. The point of this rant? We have amazing technology that CAN do amazing things, but think real hard. How often does it actually DO the things it’s supposed to? I’d venture to say less than half the time you need it to without rebooting it, updating it, re-installing it, etc… Don’t get me wrong. I love technology, but I want my tech to be reliable. Not just something rushed to market that works “some” of the time. Why do we now just see that as acceptable? It’s going to bite us in the ass one day when the whole system comes crashing down.
5 thoughts on “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To”
I think I had that same receiver back in the day. Pioneer? Of course I also had the giant speakers to go with it…. because size mattered in the 80’s.
😉
Yeah it did! Remember the big tall stereo display case with a receiver, turn table, cassette deck, equalizer, amplifier, and if you were lucky, a single drive CD player?
Oh yeah. I had that too…!
Nothing to stop you from showing up and saying “Hi. Just checking in. Nothing interesting to write about but wanted you to know I’m OK.”
I imagine everyone had a stereo system like you show……I knew where the on/off button was and how to get to the stations I wanted, and that was all I needed. All the rest of the knobs were for my husband to enjoy (yes, I know how that sounds).
Don’t stay away so long!
Ha! Nice innuendo there! I’ll try to stop by more often.