Techno Babble
I love technology and I love that I lived and experienced the introduction of computers and their brothers and sisters. That experience paid off twice in the last two days. A while back, I bought air tags and put one on my key chain. The other day, after visiting with my cousins, I started looking for my keys. I thought I’d locked them in my trunk. I was ready to call a locksmith. Then I remembered the tag. I beeped it. We could all hear the sound, and it was right in front of us, but it was faint. Why? Here’s why. I’d left my keys on the table after retrieving my guitar from the car. My cousin had come along and put my keys in her purse, thinking they were her’s.
Then yesterday, I opted to upgrade my internet service for more bandwidth. The technician came out, installed the new radio, and it all seemed to be working, except we were only getting half of what was promised. The technician suspected my router and said he’d come with one of the service provider’s routers to see if that solved the problem. He left. I continued poking around. I discovered I was simply using the wrong frequency. I was on 2.4 GHz and needed to be using 5 GHz. I logged everything into the right channel, and boom, I had the bandwidth. Thank you Google. I even connected my laptop to the router with a Cat5 cable and that really sped things up.
I suspect I can trace my interest in being a technically savvy old man to James Thurber writing about his grandmother believing that electricity leaked out of the wall plugs. I never wanted to be that person, unaware of how the world and things within it worked. I didn’t find it cute because I thought it led to gullibility and that just seemed a really bad trait, a trait that a less than scrupulous person might take advantage of in a bad way. And that’s why I’m having fun in the 21st century, ready to be a character in a William Gibson novel, jacked in and trying to use technology to my advantage.