Change

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time;
what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

Sydney J. Harris

During the past week, I know that many of us were unwillingly thrust, kicking and fighting all the way, into the new Blogger format. We gave it a good fight and hung on as long as we could to the old ways, but change is an inevitable part of life, and in the long run, we woke up one morning to find our blogs changed forever with no going back. Personally, I am not a happy camper. Not only do I like to have the freedom of choice, but I don't have an easy time with any kind changes in technology, and the way I look at things, Blogger is on the computer, the computer is technology, so, in my eyes,  Blogger is a part of technology.

I especially love it when they talk 'streamlining', and one finds there are extra steps that now need to be taken.  For example, one morning I arrived at work and opened Microsoft Word to type a letter for a client only to find that the Word that I knew was gone and had been replaced with a very confusing Microsoft 10. Even printing from this program has become a challenge.  

Not too long ago, I destroyed my Kindle by over-charging the battery.  I plugged it in about 6 pm to recharge and totally forgot about it until the next morning.  After that, it just kept rebooting itself over and over again.  So, hubby felt so bad for me he got me a new one.  This time it wasn't the keyboard type.  It was the touch screen, and I am still having a hard time with it.  I want my old keyboard back, but touch screen is the way of the future.  He has been after me to upgrade my phone, as well, but as I have told him, let's leave well enough alone.

For the life of me, I can't decide whether it is age related or just due to the fact that I never had any supervised training on these things.   Take the other evening, for example.  Since the movers broke one of our television sets, we finally got our first digital which came with an all new remote. On the old remote, I was able to set a reminder for my favorite shows.  I've yet been able to do it on this new one.  Hating to give up, I decided to try one last time, ended up pushing some button, and then the television froze. I pushed one button after another, turned the set off and on, tried everything, but it stayed stuck. Eventually, I had to spend 25 minutes waiting on the phone for the Cable company so they could walk me through it.

Sometimes I find myself longing for the good old days.  Life was a lot less complicated back then. Remember party lines?  We didn't know what it was like to walk down the street with a phone to our ear or stand and block an aisle of the supermarket as we gossiped about our neighbor. In fact, we had to share our phone line with a nearby neighbor and sometimes two neighbors. And we couldn't make a call whenever we felt like it.  We had to wait until our neighbors were done. 

We didn't have microwaves back then either, so more often than not, everyone had to sit down at the table and eat together.  Remotes?  Unheard of back then.  First of all, we only had about three channels to choose from and had to get up from the sofa to turn the knobs.  We had no PC or game console.  We spent most of our time outdoors. 

There is a young man in my group who turned 23 yesterday. A few of us oldsters were talking and when someone mentioned a 'hi-fi', this youngster asked what that was.  I then asked him if he knew what a 45 was, he said "Of course, everyone knows that.  It's a gun." What does that say about the world we live in?

Not everything that is faced can be changed.

But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin