Blogs

Tech Dumb
By Hillary Ibarra
The human race will soon adapt to have sharply curved necks and slender thumbs straight from the womb, and baby's first word will be a compound one: iPad, Facebook, Smartphone.
People not obsessed with tech will be weeded out by natural selection as the ones too primitive to survive. After all, we're the only ones openly flouting progress and convenience. We're the ones still getting lost, because our dumb phones aren't telling us which exit to take, and we forgot how to read a map while going 65 mph. We're the ones saying Pin-interest instead of Pinterest (Oh, is that just me? My teenager corrects me all the time!) And we're the dweebs still reading newspapers and magazines in doctors' offices, the car line and coffee shops.
All of this makes us pretty conspicuous. If the techies ever look up from their devices to notice we're still around, there's no telling what they might do!
The day might come when it's no longer just a look of confusion and disgust that greets us when we produce our flip phones. They might make laws against anyone driving on a freeway without Siri's supervision. We might get pushed out of the job market because we don't have access to email 3,000 times a day. There might even be laws against us breeding. Without ready access to Google in bed, how will we know we're doing it right?
Still, I defiantly declare that there are advantages to not being one of the Smartphone — or tablet-fondling crowd. Here are a few:
We still understand the term "social function." (No, it's not a group invite on Facebook.)
If we spill coffee on our newspaper or drop a library book in the toilet, we don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to replace it.
We can write without once using abbreviations such as lol, TMI or IMHO.
Our necks are youthful and supple instead of prematurely wrinkled. No tech neck!
Instead of suffering from nearsightedness caused by staring too long at tiny screens while engrossed in Facebook, we have only slight farsightedness from staring off into the distance, engrossed in our own thoughts.
So we'll just keep rebelling, thank you very much. After all, somebody should be looking up often enough to catch the sunset, enjoy the scenery and notice where the children or Grandma ran off to.
— Hillary Ibarra
Hillary Ibarra has had several humor pieces published on Aiming Low and the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop blog and was recently published at Hahas for Hoohas. She is a mother of four who dreams of playing the banjo, living in Jane Austen's childhood home and writing for more than spam artists and 50 loyal readers but can't seem to find them in the laundry. She is the mysterious blogger at No Pens, Pencils, Knives or Scissors. In her spare time she likes to threaten to sell her children to the zoo, and their little dog, too.