Personal Statement

Personal Statement

Friday, January 7, 2011

Things I'm Digging: Technology

Signed the smaller of the small fry up for soccer this morning.  That muffled "pat-pat" sound that you hear is me going to town on my own back, congratulating myself for getting the registration on file well ahead of the early deadline!  Apparently the league has switched software since the last time I went through the process, so I had to create a "family account," along with a new player profile.  In the process:

1) I entered a total of five cell phone numbers (factoring in grandparents as emergency contacts) and three e-mail accounts.

2) I was also asked to input text messaging accounts for each of my spouse and myself (our cell phone numbers, followed by the @ sign, followed by a designation of our cell carrier).  This was a new one for me, but I like it, because it means that - in the event of a sudden change in field conditions - we may actually get the wave-off prior to pulling into the parking lot.  Potentially.  Probably not.  But it could happen.

When I was finished with the registration, I pulled up the printable receipt and considered actually printing it - then found myself hitting the "print screen" button and pasting the image into Paint, where I edited it and saved it as a jpeg file.  Then I e-mailed the image to myself, to an e-mail account that dumps into my Blackberry.  That way, if I ever need to offer proof of our timely registration, I have the documentation right there on my person.

Within seconds of doing this, the following thoughts ran through my brain in the following order:

Wow, I just did that.

Wow, we actually CAN do that.  We sure have come a long way, technology-wise.  [This thought was accompanied by an in-brain montage of land phones with big unwieldy buttons and dials, ginormous cordless phones with mega-antennas, dot-matrix printers, DOS screens, etc.]

And I actually THOUGHT to do that, pretty much WITHOUT THINKING.

That last one was the kicker.  Technology has become second-nature.  It almost never occurs to me to write down the name or SKU number of a product that I see while I'm shopping, or a title of a book that I think my dad might like for Father's Day - I just snap a picture with my cellphone.  And then make a mental note to ask my dad if he wants said book in hard copy, or would he prefer to receive a Barnes & Noble gift card, so that he can buy the electronic version for his Nook?

Even my 72 year-old father is riding the technology wave . . . and I'm totally down with it if he is.

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