Technology age

 

1. Thirty Signs That Computer Technology Has Taken Over Your Life:

   - Your wife asks you to pick up some minipads for her at the store and you return with a rest for your mouse.

   - Your stationery is more cluttered than Warren Beatty’s address book. The letterhead lists a fax number, e-mail addresses for two on-line services, and your Internet address, which spreads across the breadth of the letterhead and continues to the back. In essence, you have conceded that the first page of any letter you write *is* letterhead.

   - You have never sat through an entire movie without having at least one device on your body beep or buzz.

   - You think of the gadgets in your office as “friends,” but you forget to send your father a birthday card.

   - You need to fill out a form that must be typewritten, but you can’t because there isn’t one typewriter in your house — only computers with laser printers.

   -You disdain people who use low baud rates.

   - When you go into a computer store, you eavesdrop on a salesperson talking with customers — and you butt in to correct him and spend the next 20 minutes answering the customers’ questions, while the salesperson stands by silently, nodding his head.

   - The thought that CD could refer to investment finance or music rarely enters your mind.

   - You use the phrase “digital compression” in a conversation without thinking how strange your mouth feels when you say it.

   - You constantly find yourself in groups of people to whom you say the phrase “digital compression.” Everyone understands what you mean, and you are not surprised or disappointed that you don’t have to explain it.

   - You stop saying “phone number” and replace it with “voice number,” since we all know the majority of phone lines in any house are plugged into contraptions that talk to other contraptions.

   - You sign Christmas cards by putting next to your signature.

   - You back up your data files every day.

   - You rotate your screen savers more frequently than your car tires.

   - You think jokes about being unable to program a VCR are stupid.

   - On vacation, you are reading an Unix manual and turning the pages faster than everyone else who is reading John Grisham novels.

   - You are able to argue persuasively that Ross Perot’s phrase “electronic town hall” makes more sense than the term “information superhighway,” but you don’t because, after all, the man still uses hand-drawn pie charts.

   - You go to computer trade shows and map out your path of the exhibit hall in advance. However, you cannot give someone directions to your house without looking up the street names.

   - Al Gore strikes you as an “intriguing” fellow.

   - You would rather get more dots per inch than miles per gallon.

   - You become upset when a person calls you on the phone to sell you something, but you think it’s okay for a computer to call and demand that you start pushing buttons on your telephone to receive more information about the product it is selling.

   - You know without a doubt that disks come in five-and-a-quarter and three-and-a-half inch sizes.

   - You have a functioning home copier machine, but every toaster you own turns bread into charcoal.

   - While contemporaries swap stories about their recent hernia surgeries, you compare mouse-induced index-finger strain with a nine-year-old.

   - You are so knowledgeable about technology that you feel secure enough to say “I don’t know” when someone asks you a technology question instead of feeling compelled to make something up.

   - You own a set of itty-bitty screwdrivers and you actually know where they are.

   - You understand all the jokes in this message. If so, my friend, technology has taken over your life. We suggest, for your own good, that you go lie under a tree and write a haiku. And don’t use a laptop.

   - You have ended friendships because of irreconcilably different opinions about which is better: the track ball or the track pad.

   - You email this message to your friends over the net. You’d never get around to showing it to them in person or reading it to them on the phone. In fact, you have probably never met most of these people face to face.

   12. Off the top of your head, you can think of nineteen keystroke symbols that are far more clever than