I was an early adopter of technology at one time.
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In the early 1990s I had a bag phone—a mobile phone in a nylon bag with a regular sized handset that weighed a ton and made me look like I ran off with some Korean War radioman’s equipment. It was so powerful that I could’ve called people in Fresno direct without a cell tower, and probably twisted up some brain cells too.
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I still have a Compaq portable computer that is too big to qualify as carry on luggage. It ran off floppy discs and you wrote your own programs. You had to know how Lotus 123 worked to get a formula to run. WordPerfect meant that you had to be perfect because it wasn’t helping you any—unlike Word, which does half of my writing for me now. That computer had no internal memory. Everything was on a floppy disc that was fragile so you could lose your data at any time.
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I had a Palm Pilot, one of the earliest PDAs, and then moved on to a Palm Treo cell phone. I had a cell phone that had all my contacts and could do math too. But that Palm Treo was a piece of junk as a phone, and I went through updated versions. They never worked well and thus found a place in the back of my drawer. It seemed that most “new technology” also found its way into that drawer.
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About that time, I realized that being an early adopter was expensive, and it wasn’t quite yielding the benefits of my early forays into technology. So I backed off, jumped on the pendulum and became a luddite.
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For years, I watched others beta test everything for me. I did update my Microsoft operating system, but always remained two versions behind—just in case. I had a flip phone and it worked fine—it was a phone and I used it to call people.
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One day, a couple years ago, I broke down and got an iPhone 5s and the world as I knew it changed forever. Now I can’t go about my day without it. I love it but, at the same time, I hate that, like that early bag phone, it introduced another level of access to others and information. That means it’s just that much harder to get away from everything.
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But that iPhone signaled to me that others had gotten the message that you needed to make technology easy to use and so I have found it to be since then. I have now surrounded myself with complimentary technology.
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I can set my thermostat from my bed or across the country. I can see who’s coming up the driveway. Heck, I can even yell at them. My garage door tells me when it’s open—although that one’s not so easy, so I haven’t figured it out yet.
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Technology and I have made the peace and we live harmoniously, most of the time. I do have a disfigured laptop as a reminder that technology can be frustrating and a toss across the room does not solve anything, but it sure feels good.
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John McKay is president of the Morgan Hill Downtown Association, city planning commissioner and co-founder of the Morgan Hill Tourism Alliance.
