Thursday, August 2, 2012
Confessions of a Tech addict
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| Photo by: Bill Fraser
I've been a tech junky for most of my adult life. It's time I came clean about my addiction...
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Hello.
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| THE ATARI 2600: It all started with a case of "Asteroids" |
My name is Jeff.
And I am a tech addict.
It all started innocently enough.
Back when I was about 13.
One of my friends got an Atari 2600 and I used to go to his house and my friends and I would spend our entire afternoon there playing “Pong” or “Asteroids.”
But it was okay, because it was his Atari and it was at his house.
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| TEXAS INSTRUMENTS TI99: Oh the hours we spent writing our own programs and playing "Wizardry." |
But again, that was OK, because the TI99 didn’t belong to me either.
Then in the summer of my senior year in high school things began to get really serious. Intellivision arrived on the gaming scene and my friends and I would stay out until the wee hours of the morning running from and gunning down invisible black robots in “Night Stalker” or trying to destroy Recognizers in “Tron Deadly Discs.”
My parents were worried that I wasn’t coming home until nearly sunrise, but I assured them everything was fine. We were just playing video games I told them. I could stop anytime. After all, it’s not like I played them all the time at home. We didn’t have any.
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| IBM-PC: More than just my first word processor. |
Once out of college the trend only accelerated. I quickly replaced the IBM-PC with an i386DX based machine. It had a blazingly fast 33 mhz processor and while I had it I remember tricking it out with a math co-processor and various add-in cards. When I had run out of things to upgrade, I remember calling my friend Tim over and together we performed “brain surgery” on it replacing the motherboard and processor, upgrading the machine to an i486-class computer. Next came a Pentium I machine I bought from Dell and after that came a Pentium 4 class computer with a 2.4 ghz processor and 512 mb of RAM. I still have that computer and although I’ve swapped out the hard drive on it a number of times it still serves me as my “writing” PC. Somewhere in here came my first laptop then a series of laptops for my wife and finally my latest computer, a quad-core machine with 4 gb of RAM I built about four years ago.
I now have something like two desktop PCs and at least four laptops (several of which I Frankensteined together from a series of broken laptops work was getting rid of) all of which I can’t seem to get rid of because they are still somehow useful to me.
And all that is on top of my latest can’t-live-without gadget, my work-provided smartphone.
I used to sneer at people who flocked to the stores to buy them when they first came out. “I don’t need one,” I used to tell people. “I’m not that self-important that I think people need to reach me 24/7. Besides there are some times and places I don’t want to be reached.”
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| MOTOROLA STARTAC: Resistance was futile |
“I won’t become addicted to this like I am to computers,” I told myself, and for I while I wasn’t. I carried the phone solely for business purposes (after all they were paying half the bill) and didn’t really use it that much. Then came the PDA revolution. Again, I told myself I wouldn’t get hooked on that gadget, and I was right. Our advertising director though she broke her Palm VII and I managed to fix it, but she’d already replaced it with a better model. So I used her old one for a few months until the novelty wore off. Keeping it synced with my corporate Outlook account was a pain, as was having to look up a person’s phone number on one device and calling them using another.
Then I got my first company issued smartphone and I was hooked.
My all important To Do lists and appointments automatically sync with my Outlook account and I can lookup someone’s contact info and either call, e-mail or text them all from one device. Plus I even have the entire world’s collective knowledge at my fingertips. I no longer have to remember all the assorted facts and figures I need for job, nor the arcane trivia that made me a font of useless geeky information.
Can’t remember the name of the actor who used to be in “Stargate: Universe” and is now in ABC’s “Once Upon a Time?”
No problem.
Just whip out the smart phone and a few seconds later, I have the answer: Robert Carlyle.
Things have gotten so bad with my tech addiction that I now find I can’t just watch TV without either idly surfing the web on one of my many aforementioned laptops or playing Solitaire on my cellphone. In fact last year, when we went on vacation to Europe and I was forced to leave all my tech gear at home (my cell phone doesn’t work overseas and I didn’t have a power converter that I felt comfortable wouldn’t fry my laptop) I literally got the shakes halfway to the airport. Thank the Lord my wife’s old dumb phone did work overseas and she was kind enough to let me hold onto it during the trip.
We’re due to travel back to Europe again this year, but rather than accept my problem, and try to overcome my addiction, I went out and bought a step-down power converter that will keep my laptop, iPod and other tech gear humming along on the higher European voltage.
My wife jokingly told me that I should enroll in a 12-step program to help me break my tech addiction. That’s why I’m writing this. Admitting you have a problem is the first step. The next one is believing that there is “a power greater than ourselves that can restore us to sanity.”
So now I’m turning to the highest powers I know, the three mighty Steves (Jobs, Wozniak and Ballmer) and Bill Gates, hoping they can come up with a cure for my tech addiction.
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Sure your name isn't really "Locutus", compadre ?
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Sometimes I think it should be!
DeleteHoly cr*p! We really are twins! It's like reliving my past reading this entry. You had me in "stitches"...blazingly fast 33 MHz! "It's a communicator!"...too too funny and too too real. ;)
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