
Commander Bill
My husband and I are being dragged – kicking and screaming – into the current century.
We like gadgets, but keep discovering we are living in the stone age on some things.
We had to replace our old land line phones because rats got under the house and ATE through the wiring. Since we didn’t want to crawl around under there trying to replace all the wiring, and couldn’t find anyone willing to do it for us, we bought essentially a cell phone on a base to replace our system. We’ve used that for a long time, adding an answering machine that we liked better than the one provided, and then my husband designed a call screening program that had callers pressing 1 “if they were a real person and weren’t selling anything” in order for the phone to ring here.
This got wonky, not recognizing callers we had put on our list, and hanging up on people after they pressed 1. We’ve been living with NO caller screening for awhile, and I’ve been going nuts.
We got a new phone system yesterday and my husband and son set it up. We’ve ordered two more phones and charging bases so we can have phones everywhere we would like them. I managed to ANSWER my phone last night, patting myself on the head. This morning I actually manged to MAKE a call, after fumbling around awhile. My husband has just finished creating a directory.
We have gotten several reminders that the rest of the world has gone on past us, while we stayed in our cocoon –
- We installed a geothermal heat and air system several years ago. Our thermostats have been misbehaving and we were having trouble getting them set correctly. The guy who checks our system out twice a year tactfully suggested that since our thermostats were older than he was (he didn’t say that) maybe we should get ones that were made to work with geothermal, which doesn’t need ’emergency heat.. He helped us decide which ones to get and installed them for us. We’re now doing fine, able to control the temperatures in our house just fine for the most efficiency.
- We have actually donated several items that were causing havoc and tension around here, rather than ‘helping’ us or making our lives simpler. :0)
- We were even reminded how old we are when we got a Synology – a device that allows us to record our DVD collection, making them available to play on our television and get rid of the physical DVDs. I looked each of them up on Amazon with the idea of selling them. I had DVDs that had the same cover picture – and many were Blu-rays, but the production date on ours was so old Amazon sneered at us and wouldn’t allow me to list them. We ended up listing the ones that were ‘acceptable’ and giving 217 DVDs to the local library for their next fundraising sale…
We may be older than dirt, but we’re still able to kick and scream as we’re forced to enter the current century!