The Luddite’s Lament

~ Ellie

So I decided enough’s enough, it was high time for me to get with the Cyber. I mean, everyone’s always talking about the Google, the Facebook and ekcetera, so I was thinking maybe I should really learn how to do them.

Little girl with smart phone
Photo (cc) by r. nial bradshaw

So last weekend I called my daughter but she said she was too busy. Instead she brought over her little girl, my granddaughter, who is 5.

Boy, is that little Samantha ever smart, I tell ya! “Look Grandpa,” she said. “Look what I can do!” And I see that little blue bird on there, on my phone, so I know it’s the Twitter. And don’t ya know, she starts twitterin’ away, as fast as she can! With two thumbs!!

Oh I didn’t even know I had the Twitter on my phone, but now that I think about it, I remember a couple of weeks ago my grandson Johnny was playin’ around with the phone and I asked him what was he doin’ and he said he was load-downing. Or something. So somehow I guess what he was doing was, he got the Twitter to float on over to my phone. From somewhere.

See, maybe you guessed by now, I don’t know much. About the Cyber, I mean. I just don’t get it. To me, a phone is a phone, y’know? You phone somebody on it. And now there’s all this crazy stuff on it. Which I can’t even do. And how do I know that fancy stuff won’t leak out from my phone to somebody else’s phone?!

Nope, nope, I think one of these days I’m gonna ask my daughter – or maybe one of my grandkids – to take off all those extra doohickeys from my phone. I just wanna make calls. And get calls. And that’s it.

I figure if phones was meant to have all that fancy-schmancy stuff on ’em, they would’ve come that way in the first place. I still remember waaaaay back when I was a kid, and we had a phone. On the wall. And our phone number was a coupla letters and then four numbers. That’s it! Not much to remember, eh? And I did. Remember it, I mean. My number. Even when I was only 5!

24 thoughts on “The Luddite’s Lament”

  3. I guess I have a split personality–half Luddite and half techie (or is that trekkie). The hubster is all Luddite. Oh man. His flip phone. His horror at the thought of Facebook and Twitter. His inability to take a photograph (with camera or phone). I have taught my mom Facebook 3 times now, but she still isn’t using it because it doesn’t come naturally to her.

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  4. I laughed that you want a phone to make calls and not much else. That’s John, too! Before I gave him his new phone, I removed lots of things from it. Come to think of it, I’m going to hide the camera icon. He keeps hitting it and talking back angrily to it. I wonder why I didn’t think to remove it before. He is going to be grateful to you, Ellie.

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      1. I’m glad I don’t know many who have a love/hate relationship with tech gadgets. One is enough! I’m going to send him around the bend this Christmas. I have an ornament that hangs on the tree that is a Bluetooth speaker.

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  8. I remember having to memorize all the important phone numbers or carrying around a little note pad as your phone book. Now I have the extensions of my most called colleagues memorized… and that doesn’t help in case of an emergency!

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  9. My MIL is a super Luddite, really she’s just lazy. She has had a simple flip phone for 6 years we provided her. She still can’t check her voice messages! Half the time she has the speaker phone on by accident.

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