How’s your Palm Pilot working these days?

How is your Palm Pilot working these days? Walkman still in fine fettle? Been faxing your friends a lot of late? Ludicrous, no? In the age of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, I pod and emails such questions are mirth-inducing because technology has moved along. Some would say ‘advanced’, but I’ll be content with just ‘moved along’, much as your Prius has moved along from a Model-A Ford.

Yet, those items I mentioned were up-to-the-minute not so very long ago. And now they’re gone. They’re funny in their hopeless quaintness, much as 8-track decks are an absolute laugh-riot, used often by stand-up comics to represent an archaic mentality in some stuck-in-time individual.

Yet, technological change is not faddism per se. Instead, it’s representative that whatever is in current use is in some way preferable to what preceded. And the new stuff takes over our consciousness so rapidly and fully that we scarcely remember and rarely think of that which preceded. When did you last think about a rotary dial telephone? Or going back a bit further, party-lines and contacting the operator who would inquire, “Number puh-lee-yuz” like Lily Tomlin did in her old Laugh-In routine. Few people younger than a certain age would get the humor.

Out on a shelf in my garage sits a typewriter. It’s a fine electric typewriter; a costly one that was absolutely up-to-the-minute when I bought it in the late 1980s. I did a lot of work on that machine and it was a highly satisfactory one. It’s still in perfect working-order. But, in 1994 I bought my first computer, and the trusty typewriter went onto a shelf, never to be resurrected.

My first computer, a fine and reliable Mac, was a desk model. Big and cumbersome and featuring a dial-up modem to connect me to the Internet, and to such pre-Google providers as Alta-Vista. I recall beginning a search that would take an inordinate amount of time and literally as often as not the search would either crash or somebody in the household would pick up the telephone to make a call, cut off the connection, and I would be forced to begin all over again. Ultimately I got an extra telephone line into the house so that such an eventuality could be avoided. However, in pre-cable or wireless days it still didn’t speed up the process in terms of time or efficiency.

And that first computer with all its cumbersome components, its modem, its Zip-drive and its crappy little inkjet printer (that sometimes worked) cost a small fortune, relatively. Meanwhile, I am typing this on a little Acer laptop that (touch wood) is still chugging along after four years and was cheap-like-borscht to purchase, and the laser printer to which it is connected was cheaper than my inkjet crap.

In so-saying, however, I am wary of technological change. In the first place I have very little techno-geek about me so I am not at all enchanted by advances. A tool is a tool and it aids me in some way to carry out my life in a less frustrating and inefficient manner, I’ll buy in. But I won’t take part if I see no advantage. Furthermore, that which is trendy sometimes lies in jeopardy of being this year’s Palm Pilot or 8-track.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m a cheapskate bastard.

As I’ve mentioned before, my car is a 1992 model. It’s a lovely little car. It’s a Nissan NX-2000 and goes like hell and only has 150 K on the clock (and that’s kilometers, not miles). And, with the T-roof off on a summer day, it’s like veritable motoring heaven. So, despite all the wonderful features some newer cars offer, I am absolutely content with my old Nissan. I can’t imagine not being with it. It would seem disloyal. It would also mean I’d have to assume car payments after having been detached from such a consideration for well over a decade.

In another realm, I have toyed with the idea of getting a flat-screen TV because I’ll concede the picture quality is brilliant. But, our old TVs still work just fine, and at the end of the day, whatever the quality of resolution might be, you are still subject to the same crap offerings.

And I really would like to figure out what to do with that Smith-Corona in the garage where it sits lonely on a shelf right next to the venerable Nissan.