Obsolete!

A while back, I posted on the topic of things that are "going away," inspired by the growing irrelevance of the terms "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" in a world of digital clocks. My friend Katherine wrote to me on the subject of something else she suddenly realized is getting more rare: the dreaded blue screen of death.

Anyone who uses Windows knows about the blue screen of death, the ugly blue screen covered with odd combinations of numbers and letters which are the Microsoft code for "dude, you are sooo screwed!", and indicate that your computer has changed from valuable office instrument to expensive paperweight. If you used versions of Windows before XP, you became intimately familiar with the blue screen of death and the horrors of trying to figure out what had caused the problem. Microsoft helped you with useful and intellectually friendly messages like, "The kernel at j3y776pt has lost contact with the hyperborean frammistat and caused a rupture in the fabric of the universe. Universe will reboot in 30 seconds. Continue? Abort? Ignore?"

Windows XP, however, was a much more stable platform, and blue screens of death became relatively rare (this rare stability made it necessary for Microsoft to switch to Vista in order to continue tormenting users). Katherine's point was this: blue screen of death has become a term likely to be meaningless to new generations of computer users.

But as there are many things that are fast becoming obsolete, there are also skills that are becoming obsolete as well. Miss Cellania today included a link to this interesting post dedicated to obsolete skills, many of which I once possessed:

Dialing a rotary phone;

Using a slide rule;

Using carbon paper to make copies;

Getting off the couch to change channels on the TV set; and,

Adjusting the rabbit ears on the TV set to improve the reception.

This has spawned a new site formally dedicated to obsolete skills, with a lengthy A-to-Z list of things we once needed to know, and now mark us as hopeless old codgers.

The world is moving on, and moving faster every day. Much of the information we once thought was important and the skills we once believed were critical is now quaintly outdated at best, or completely useless at worst. My grandchildren live in a world I would never have imagined, and I'm sure my parents and grandparents would say the same thing.

I'm not quite ready yet to sit on the proverbial ice floe and drift out to sea, but it's getting harder to keep up with the technological joneses all the time.

It does, however, provide ample things for us professional curmudgeons to grouse about.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo