RIVER BENDER - December,  2009

Seriously, why doesn't everybody have a computer now? I understand why folks didn't get one when they cost several thousand dollars but they're now only a few hundred dollars and I've seen used ones go for far less. I paid $100 for my first Texas Instrument calculator. If I had waited I could have bought it today for $4.95 but look what I would have missed having to use my slide rule all those years.

What folks with no computer are missing today is so immense it's hard to know where to begin. Years before Internet arrived in the early '90s computers were mainly used for business and those at home for entertainment. With Internet, everything changed and the public began accessing the World Wide Web. Search engines like Google enabled them to get answers to just about any question they could come up with and also be able to send e-mail to anywhere in the world. I don't see how anyone would want to miss out on such fun. It would be like not owning a refrigerator or an indoor toilet.

Hardly a day goes by in our household that we aren't looking up information on something. It might be as simple as the definition or spelling of a word, an address, a phone number or a map to pulling up the complete biography or genealogy of someone. Searching is the key in Internet because one is constantly using a search engine to find something, perhaps an operating manual for a washing machine, or how to repair your car, or looking for photos of people, birds, fish, etc, or digging up historical records or old songs and lyrics, things we never dreamed just a few years ago that we'd be doing today. And yet we still have folks sitting home reading books and newspapers, using typewriters, buying music cassettes and sending snail-mail, just like we all did only a few years ago. Computers are no longer a novelty. Everybody should have one.

Everybody? Well, maybe not. There are folks out there that will forever prefer the comfort of things just the way they are and have no desire to learn anything new, especially something electronic and the reading of instructions. One computer I gave away was returned because it was too complicated. I receive calls all the time from folks who have been given a computer by their grandchildren and they're at a total loss what to do when something goes wrong. It's very difficult to even try helping them and that's when I begin to realize that perhaps they should have never gotten a computer. They do require a lot of care and updates. The folks that don't take care of them are probably the same ones whose car doesn't last long by them only putting gas in it.

I don't think I could survive without a computer. But I'm convinced there are folks who still agree with Andy Rooney when he says "Computers make it easier to do lots of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done."

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