So I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about you, well not you, but this stupid blog.
And you know what? Before I can go back to sleep, I have to talk about Palm Pilots…before I can write to you about e-commerce and Shopify etc.
(Oh, and I have an English teacher friend who hates ellipses…. Look ma! No hands! I can write ellipses as much as I want here. Nobody gives a flip. Ellipses…. Ellipses… Ellipses… There I think I’ve rebelled enough grammatically for one day.)
See how good I am at not focusing? Yeah, focus – it’s one of those entrepreneurial taglines of what you’re supposed to do if you’re an honest to goodness entrepreneur type. And let’s be honest who likes that?
Why do you think we’re all slaves to our phones? We’d rather do anything than focus. We’re all just multi-tasking giant lab rats to the bots we carry by hand every day. And the bots? They’re trying to escape from our clutches. Why do you think cell phone screens shatter?
Ok. I’ll focus now and get back on task as to the purpose of this post. But admit it; you like me better this way. You’re a bad influence. Why do I put up with you? 😉
Alright. Back to palm pilots. To you youngsters that have no idea what I’m talking about, a palm pilot is not a hand job. See, the gutter? You’re down there again. We really have to stop meeting like this.
No, forget Apple or Microsoft, a palm pilot was the handheld device that was the beginning of the end even more than say an ipod. Because that’s when these bots started following us around in our daily lives, not just to entertain us but to control our schedules and our contacts.
We willingly carried them. In our hands. It’s how we first became real slaves to tech.
I did not buy one. My spouse thought it was cool. Gifted me one.
I used it. Know what happened over the years? Yes, the battery got old. Result?
It would beep incessantly. I had a babysitter who couldn’t take it anymore and she had more courage than me. Know what she did? She unplugged my palm pilot. You rebel babysitter you. She was a Jedi Knight in disguise, ahead of her time.
Know what that meant? It died. I lost everything. The palm pilot memory was wiped clean.
And as I’d dumped my memory into it instead of my old fashioned leather bound day timer, I now have amnesia of every contact I ever had. Poof! So long childhood friend. I don’t remember your address or phone number.
Good bye life. Yes that Palm Pilot, specifically a Sony Clie, was the beginning of the end. Mark my words.
They were like the radios before the flip phones or something like that.
And this, children, was before backups. You couldn’t just connect these silly things to back them up. Or maybe I just liked the beeping in the far recess of my house, the heartbeat of that particular bot, reminding me that they’re coming. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I see you Sony Clie (my special brand of palm pilot). No, I hear you. Ok. Now I don’t.
RIP palm pilots. And every person who hasn’t heard from me in over a decade. Blame the bots. It’s not my fault man.
