The wife’s birthday was recently and she pretty much wanted only one thing – music by an artist named Dan Vasc.
She happened upon a video of his on Facebook when it randomly popped up in her newsfeed. She liked what she heard and started going through all the music videos of his she could find.
The guy is good. He can do a good range of material from metal to gospel. I wouldn’t say he does them all perfectly but he is decent. I can listen to him without wanting to slam the off button.
The wife is a little difficult to buy for. Most of the items I have bought her independently of her input were not met with great enthusiasm. So I’ve learned over the years to ask her what she wants and only get what she tells me she wants.
Her kids are sort of in the same boat and usually ask me if the wife has made any comments on what she wants as gifts. This year I could tell them she wanted music from Dan Vasc. Fortunately, he’s fairly prolific. We got together and plotted and planned and decided on three of his albums that have the songs the wife likes the most.
Only we discovered he doesn’t have albums. Or CDs. Or any other type of physical media. Everything he has out is in .MP3 format. This causes a problem.
The wife and technology do not always get a long. That’s a bit of an understatement. The wife would do better in any age before the 1960s. She has an old flip phone because she doesn’t get along with my smartphone. There are times when she borrows my phone to make a call. I’ve managed to get her to the point where she can unlock the phone and make a phone call. She can at least make an emergency phone call should the need arise.
The problem comes in when she returns my phone to me. Somehow, she manages to launch apps, and changes settings. Most of the time I can undo any changes but one or twice I’ve had to do some research to figure out how to undo the damage.
The wife doesn’t want .MP3s. She doesn’t want to sit at her computer to be able to listen to her music, nor does she want to listen to it on her phone, not that she would be able to anyway. When we told her about her gift, she flat out rejected it.
If it is an .MP3 we can listen to it in the car (her preferred music listening location) by putting them on a thumb drive. Or I could put the music on my phone and play it through the Bluetooth connection. Or I could burn them to a CD-ROM (quaint, I know) and she can listen to the music on our CD player, or on our DVD player. The main drawback to this plan is that my computer doesn’t have a CD drive. Nor does the wife’s. I believe I have an old laptop that has one. Or I could buy a USB CD drive and burn them off that way.
We are trying to get the wife to understand that she has options to listen to the music. I think we’ll get her there. Once the light dawns, I’ll go ahead and get her the music she wants. I hope she’ll like her gift.
Sometimes, getting people to move into the twenty-first century takes some effort on our parts. In the end, I think this will be a good move for her.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum
I have to go with your wife on this one. I am NOT a technophobe, but I am not a technophile either. Going after the latest technology simply because it’s the latest technology? Sorry, I have better things to do.
I am reminded, back in the 1840’s, some person remarked to Henry David Thoreau that thanks to the marvelous invention of the telegraph, a person in Maine can now talk instantaneously to a person in Texas. Thoreau replied immediately, scornfully, and absolutely correctly, “Why would anyone in Maine want to talk to anyone in Texas?”
What we now call the landline phone was a marvelous device. It rang, you picked it up, and you started talking. Simple.
The first cel phones were equally simple, plus they had the wondrous feature of not needing to be connected to a wall by a cord (well, except when they were charging.) Other improvements came along. Sending and receiving texts. Playing games, cameras, culminating in what is now called the flip phone. I had a flip phone for years and years. It did everything I needed or wanted to do. (Once, a child I knew saw me pulling out my flip phone and was amazed. “You still have a flip phone? Those have been around for like, 10 years!” I replied, “you’ve been around for about 10 years, should we get rid of you now?” He never talked to me about technology again.)
Then came the IPhone and its counterpart, the Smart Phone. (Side note: the almost universal appellation of the adjective “smart” in front of a new technical device does not mean that technology is actually growing smarter. It means that consumers are growing dumber. But I digress.) I held off on getting one for years and years because for years and years it never offered me anything I actually needed. Then I finally got one. It allows me to make money through Door Dash, and it allows me to use the washers and dryers in my apartment complex’s laundromat. Everything else on it, about 98% of the programming as far as I can tell, I either don’t need or got easily via my old flip phone. Most of it is specifically designed to extract either money of personal information from me. But I can deal with that.
Except for one thing. When my landline rang, all I had to do was pick it up and start talking. When my flip phone rang, I picked it up, pushed a button and started talking.
When my so-called smart phone rings, it’s not enough to just push a button. I have to manipulate that button in a very specific way or the call goes unanswered.
BUT
all those apps that I don’t want or need, that are designed to get me to spend money? They open easily. I happen to wave a fingertip within 1/8 inch of the surface of my phone surface, and a strange app I’ve never heard of is opened. I lock my phone, put it in my pocket, and when I take my phone out 15 minutes later, 10 or so apps are opened. I have screenshots of all of them. I’m even finding, when I open my phone, 4 or 5 new apps that weren’t there 10 minutes ago have mysteriously self loaded.
If I weren’t using Door Dash as a significant source of income, I’d go back to a flip phone in a heartbeat.