Date: 2005-02-18
To: Why Can't They Make Things Simple Anymore??
Miles today: 0.0

Sometimes I feel exactly like that old guy on 60 Minutes, the Rooney guy, when it comes to complaining about things. Take my new watch, for example. Back in my day, when you got a new watch, you did two things: (a) you pulled the watch stem out and you twirled it around until you got the minute hand and the hour hand both lined up on the dial where you wanted them; and (b) you pushed the stem back in and twirled it around a few more times to wind it up. That was it. You were done. All you had to do after that was to wind it up again periodically, and you could pretty much do that just out of habit.         Do you think they could leave a good thing alone? Naaah. That would defeat the purpose of progress. You know, all those little improvements that are supposed to help us, and some of them actually do, but always at the cost of making our lives more complicated. First, they added the day of the week and the day of the month to the face of the watch. When they did that, you had to wind the crap out of the little stem to get both of those all lined up right, ¢cause there was no going back, just forward. So, if you were trying to set the day for Friday, and you thought you had it right, only at noon, the darn thing clicks over to Saturday, then you had to wind through six and a half more 24 hour periods to have a another go at Friday. Progress¢¦Then they added a ¢self-winding¢ feature. That was probably a good thing, since you no longer had to remember to wind your watch. I never did figure out how that worked. It had something to do with just moving your arm around, and the clock got itself all wound up again. That was unequivocal progress, so of course they couldn¢t let that last too long. They decided to make an electronic watch which, of course, meant they had to add a battery. When that dies, of course, you can¢t just replace it yourself. That would be too simple. No, you have to find a jewelry store where they will replace it for you. Ok, it could be worse. The batteries last at least a year, so I can sort of live with that.         But then came the age of computers, and it¢s been downhill ever since. Take the new watch I got for my hike that came last night. Now, it¢s not one of those super-duper things that calculate the temperature, the altitude, the wind direction, the up-to-the-minute value of your stocks and bonds, and plays all your favorite music. It just tells the time and has a stopwatch setting and an alarm. It¢s really pretty basic for a watch these days. Over coffee this morning, I decided to have a go at ¢setting it up¢ so that I could start wearing it today. I thought it might take me a few minutes, and then I¢d get on with my exercise program ¢ you know, all that treadmill and weight machine work that¢s going no where.         So I open up the box, take out the watch, and out falls this instruction booklet. A BOOKLET! Now you need a booklet to set your darn watch. And you know what it tells you to do when all you want to do is to set the time of day? First you have to select the right ¢mode¢. Then you have to pull the stem out half way, and select the correct minute, and press the ¢set/start¢ button. Then you repeat all that to do the hour. Then you have a choice of date settings ¢ you can do: MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY or YY/MM/DD. Then you have to decide whether you want a 12 hour clock or a 24 hour military-time clock. I was doing pretty well, I thought, and everything was coming up the way I wanted it to. But then they made me set up the right time zone, and that's when I think I got into trouble. I couldn¢t figure out when to pull out the stem half way or all the way and when to hit the ¢set/start¢ button as opposed to the ¢lap¢ button. I THINK ¢ no guarantees ¢ that I managed to set up ¢TZ1¢ as Eastern Standard Time, and ¢TZ2¢ as the equivalent Day Light Savings time. When we hit that at the end of March somewhere in Georgia, I¢ll be ready!!         Unfortunately, I then realized that something I had done had messed up the day/month/year thing. I tried to reset that, and thought I had it right, except that I somehow couldn¢t get the ¢day¢ option to come out right. You can either have ¢day 1 or day 2¢, etc. OR you can have ¢Monday, Tuesday, etc., which is what I wanted.         I couldn¢t do it. Try as I might, the darn thing wouldn¢t cooperate. I went back to square one several times and ran through all the options, and just couldn¢t make it say ¢Friday¢ to save my life. I think I might have said a bad word at that point. Ok, maybe more than one. My wife came into the kitchen and asked me what was wrong. That, course, gave me an opportunity to vent some of my accumulated frustration, which I did. That sort of outburst never seems to bother her.   She knows not to take it personally and, as you all know by now, she loves me anyway.         By that point, of course, my 30 minutes of training time were down the tubes, which really honked me off. You see, I DO take it personally. Those guys who invent these watches must take some kind of perverse pleasure in knowing what is going to happen when some old fart like me gets our hands on one of their brilliant new inventions. I really think they must program into the computer chip a loop that¢s designed just to catch us out. How the heck the thing knows it¢s one of US, I¢ll never understand. It¢s kind of magical ¢ like that self-winding feature they used to have.         I don¢t know. I¢m wearing the darn thing, and the time of day is right, so I guess I should count my blessings and let it go at that. What troubles me is not so much the watch. It¢s the phenomenon that concerns me. You see, I¢ve got this new Pocketmail device, and this digital camera that I have had for two weeks. I¢ve still got to learn how to use both of those.         I have a three day weekend coming up and my plan has been to at least figure out how to use the camera ¢ try to down load the pictures I¢ve taken and upload a couple of them to my TJ journal. I¢m afraid it¢s not going to be pretty. I suspect I may end up using a whole bunch of bad words before I¢m through. Oh well. Let¢s all try to look on the bright side, shall we. That¢s what I generally try to do, and most of the time it works. At least I can use up some of those spare ear plugs I bought from Home Depot. I¢ll just hand them out to the wife and kids before I open up the instruction manual¢¦. Wish me luck!Stay tuned,