At the E-World’s Edge

As if the world doesn’t have enough acronyms, now come all these techno products with abbreviated names.  One can identify these aliens by their buttons, which are not unlike those countless buttons on a television (a.k.a. or Acronym Known As TV) remote control.  Whatever happened to good, old on-off and simple channel buttons when the biggest problem of a TV remote is finding it?

In these lost-and-found cycles, I round up the usual suspects? beneath throw pillows, under chairs, beside the sink, stuck to a Raggedy Ann doll, or dragged by three cats who thought it a shiny mouse.  Strange that in a remote’s wacky number of buttons, there isn’t one that could make it fly to my hands.

I must be a visionary for banning TV from bedrooms.  (You want to watch TV, be alive, stand up, and go to the living room, were my diktat.)  It would have been ungracious to find a remote between one’s toes, if not in one’s mouth, upon waking.

The more these gizmos invade our lives and homes, the more I’m proud to be born yesterday.  How else to cope with the condescending looks of the X, Y and Z generations?  (The last letter may be outed soon for our five-year-old’s generation.)  But what hapless generations to be identified with one letter each, at the tail end of the alphabet at that, hah!  Single letters aren’t much compared to the metaphors in the Lost Generation, the Baby Boomers, or the Beat Generation.

But with bowed head I had to ask a GenXer to make my laptop play music.  And our five-year-old solved the mystery of watching Garfield the movie on her computer (yes, her own, because I didn’t want her tinkering with mine) after I tried and failed for two nights.

As for acronyms and how they’ve invaded our lives, throw in those new words that start with small letters that are apart from, yet connected to, a full word.  Take email and iPod.  At least, doctors’ CT-Scan is capitalized.  And TB is so yesteryear.

There was that gift earlier this year that I turned around, checked from top to bottom and side to side, and still couldn’t make heads or tails of.  Glad Pic (Tagbilaran’s own Maria Fe Gulles; make that MFG) was around to tell me it was an MP3.  If there ever were an MP1 and MP2, I was asleep when they came.  It took me time to appreciate its worth and function though.  Anything in my ears except earrings is anathema.

Now the MP3 serves best as one of my USBs.  (What’s this?  United States Bodies?)  I was about to give it to a nephew who I felt would love it more.  But I thought of YNA3, or Young Nephews Are Three.  Why give to only one?  Then a niece says she has an MP4.  It cut my delusion of being on track in the techno race.

Then there’s the mobile phone.  For years I stuck to my creed that mobiles are for calling and messaging.  Until lately.  All I wanted was a plastic cover for my mobile to replace its torn one.  None was available, I was told, because my mobile was so yesterday.

Funny you had to buy the plastic cover first before the phone, the husband, who expected me to choose a thin mobile, commented.  I chose a bulky model.  It is Sisyphean to find my mobile inside my bag.

My new mobile has all the trappings, camera, video, bluetooth (as in ‘Roses are red, my love/ Your teeth are blue-hu-hu’).  Ugh.  I can’t see all this without reading glasses.

Worse, I need to press more buttons before I could do what I want.  Time was when answering was easier.  The husband wondered why I failed to answer; I wondered why his calls were cut off.  It turned out that I kept pressing the ‘off’ button.  Bobbsey Manding Buma-at could be leading a more peaceful life for snubbing mobiles.

Get used to it, my kid sister says, or give it to me.  That’ll take years, I say.  But help me put off the camera, please.  I keep shooting my foot, left or right or both.

Get used to it I will.  Meantime, I painted my toenails.  If I keep shooting my feet with this new mobile, they might as well be photogenic. Make that pFeet.

(21 Oct 2007)