Random stuff that drives me batshit crazy: Living in a modern world

You know what? I’m sick of the world telling me how to simplify my life and miniaturize my possessions, or in some cases, make my possessions disappear altogether.

Daughter #1 is a Spotify Disciple, and says there’s no way she’d ever want want our massive compact disc collection after we’re … you know, dead … because there soon won’t even be any way to play these antiques. And besides, she can already find all this stuff on Spotify!

Never mind that we already spent vast sums converting our music to CDs from cassette tapes and vinyl on the promise that we would have CDs forever because they’re so hard to damage.

Just a small part of our collection of CDs, which merely marks us as old-fashioned geezers.

Same thing with pictures and movies. Just recently, we paid to have our old home movies converted from tape to CD so our kids would have them forever. But it seems the thing now is that the movies need to be on a thumb drive or some other device so they can be streamed wirelessly to the computer or television.

Books? Who needs ’em? We can just put the whole library on a Kindle, which, if you’re into dictionaries, you already know means to set alight or burn.

Meanwhile, my wife has been spending countless hours scanning old photographs and sending them by e-mail to the kids, who may or may not be saving them in some kind of ethereal cloud, from which they will surely disappear one day with a puff of smoke that smells like grandpa’s ashes.

New technology always makes our lives better — except for when it doesn’t, and something I saw at work the other day tipped me right over the edge. But before I tell you about it, please have a look at my refrigerator and freezer:

The old-timeyness of our white refrigerator and freezer is partially obscured by the old-timey photographs, old-timey grocery list, old-timey sample ballot and old-timey refrigerator magnets.

Just look at those those antiques! You can barely see those out-of-date white appliances (haven’t opted-in yet on stainless steel) because they’re so cluttered with family photographs and (gasp) refrigerator magnets! There’s also a shopping list, and even a sample ballot from our upcoming primary election (I know its old-fashioned, but we vote … ALWAYS).

The fresh, clean look of a digital touchscreen makes refrigerator magnets and their clutter obsolete!

To me, our kitchen appliances give the place that lived-in look, and it’s always nice to have a gander at the grandkids before popping out a bag of frozen peas. But why should we live with such an unsightly mess when, for the paltry sum of $5,553, we can buy a new stainless steel refrigerator/freezer with a digital touchscreen that can display a calendar, notes, digitized photographs, and whatever else we can dream up?

Yeah, a touchscreen refrigerator is just what we need, but while we’re saving up the money, perhaps you’ll forgive me if I insert some different music into my car’s old-timey CD changer and head on over to the dollar store, which in a different era might have been called a five-and-dime. I need to buy a few new refrigerator magnets!

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