Embracing the Stone Age

Last night I went out with a friend and we started talking about how our parents are completely technologically inept.

Seriously inept.

Like won’t even attempt to turn on a computer.

Doesn’t even want to touch one.

For all of these years, I thought it was just me and my parents who, stood firmly in what I like to call the stone age: They read the paper. In fact, every morning my father would drive to the store in town for his morning coffee, buy half a dozen doughnuts and the local paper.

Every single morning.

Me, on the other hand, I haven’t read a newspaper since 1996—when I lived at home and would swipe Parade on my way out the door on a Sunday morning—and was only allowed to—after my father had read it. So when my Father retired and started to get hard of hearing (that’s being nice…the man became completely deaf) his dutiful children wanted to bring him up to speed by buying them a small laptop.

You know, for basic communication. To let us know he’s um, still alive??

Now, I don’t claim to be all that technologically savvy—I have my moments where I can’t even figure out how to post something, save something, or in most cases, delete something I’ve written. But technology today has gotten to the point where it is so easy, there comes a time where you just have to bite the bullet and embrace it to make your life easier.

Sounds logical, right? So we thought...

We took my Father to Best Buy to show him laptops with basic, basic, basic email functions so that he could stay in contact with his children living all across the country. Seriously, the computer had one application: email. You click, write in the “white space” (as I have described to him many times) and hit “send.”

That’s all we asked the man to do!

As it turned out, my Father never touched “that thing” by the phone (he dusted it once in awhile, but that was about it).

Now, at this point, my father became really hard of hearing and being his dutiful children, we bought him one of those hearing impaired phones—one that literally shook the house when someone called. In fact, the ring was so obnoxious the dog would get up and bark at it. Unfortunately, on many occasions, my Dad couldn’t get to the phone in time to answer it and we’d have to call back (multiple times) making the dog—and my Father—CRAZED. It was so loud—the neighbors started to complain about the phone and the traumatized dog.

Basic communication with my Father became null and void until one day, he decided he wanted a fax machine.

You heard me right. A fax machine.

He went out and bought himself a fax machine, not realizing that in order to actually communicate with someone, that person also needed to have a fax machine. Take a wild guess what his dutiful children got for Christmas that year? He was so proud of himself that he had solved this "little communication problem" as he called it.

So there we all were…faxing my Dad and trying to stay in contact with him daily up until the day he died.

Seriously, when you talk to your sister on the phone and ask, “Have you faxed Dad today? What’s up with him?” you have officially embraced the stone age.

Needless to say, my Father welcomed us with open arms.