High Tech Crow
The Source
No doubt about it . . .my least favorite food is crow, but last week I had to eat a bit of it and it was as bitter as I’d imagined. The plan: head to lower Arkansas to view a play of mine….a ten-hour drive including the aspect of maneuvering both St. Louis and Little Rock traffic, finding two motels, trying to decipher the various speed limits, avoiding major road construction, and searching for quick places to tinkle. I don’t even like driving in Springfield and for some reason St. Louis has always bugged me. I’d been dreading the trip for weeks so I enlisted two former students to help drive and provide some good company. I’ve complained loudly and long about the way tech devices have gained control of our lives, especially those of the teen and twenties generation. More than once I’ve been tempted to stomp an IPod, IPad or Smart Phone to a bloody death while talking to someone who could no longer make eye contact. Both boys brought their smart phones and I so wondered if they’d actually be any good for conversation. But, being pretty good kids they managed to limit their button poking. The plan: leave Arenzville at 10 p.m. after my crew had traveled in from their respective colleges, drive as far as my consciousness would allow, avoid the St. Louis rush hour traffic, and find a motel somewhere in Missouri to break up the ten-hour trek. Somewhere south of St. Louis at about 1 a.m. I told the boys to start looking for motels. Cory asked, “How much do you want to pay?” I told him that I just wanted a place to sleep. In about three seconds he announced, “There’s a Best Western in 3 miles, a Hampton in 3.2, and a Comfort Inn in 1.5 miles. Want me to check rates?” I asked him where he was getting all that info and he held up his Smart Phone. I told him to find the cheapest and before I’d finished my sentence he told me to turn right immediately. By the time I’d pulled up in front of the Comfort Inn he’d booked our room, bartered for a cheaper rate through another online service, and showed me a picture of our room. I was nothing short of flabbergasted. When we pulled out the next morning I told the boys that we’d need to stop soon for gas. Brandon informed me that we still had 182 miles left on this tank of gas. He’d found my Nissan on the Internet, poked in the miles we’d driven from Arenzville and knew how much further we could go. My days of driving down the Interstate and looking for gas station signs were over. The kid told me that my best bet was to drive another forty miles where he’d found the gas prices online for a good deal cheaper than our current location. When it came time for lunch the boys had a contest on who could find a list of restaurants the quickest. Cory won with a time of 0:09 seconds. We choose an Oriental Buffet and the boy brought up the menu for me to view. Astounded, I jokingly asked if he could tell me where to find the restroom. From somewhere deep in the bowels of his handheld device he brought up a floor plan of the restaurant. Good grief. This was getting ridiculous. When I purchased my car it came with a ridiculously complex navigation system so I felt fairly confident on our ability to navigate the complicated web of highways to get us to our Arkansas destination. I didn’t purchase the “traffic report” option because when you live in Arenzville, the only traffic problems are caused by two guys in pickup trucks blocking the road in front of the post office with their morning chat. However, roads around Little Rock were a bit more encumbered and my poor little onboard GPS system didn’t know about the traffic jams. Long story short, I eventually turned off my car’s navigation system. It was plumb stupid compared to the boys’ Smart Phones. Cory is a news junkie so on the way down he was able to call up the recent events of the Presidential race, the latest news from the Middle East, and the WLDS news page. At one point his phone suddenly announced, “You are about to encounter rain.” And we did. He’d brought along one of those multiple adaptors to plug into my dash so my little Nissan became a spiders web of cords and cables. The act of two long-legged boys and one arthritic grouch getting out of the car resembled the 100-meter hurdles. All of which is to say that this trip that I’d dreaded for so long became quite easy thanks to a couple of Smart Phones and a couple of smart boys. I did notice one peculiar thing. . . whenever one of them took the wheel to drive for a couple hundred miles, their fingers were all over the dashboard. They couldn’t stop poking buttons. I guess it’s a tradeoff we’ll have to live with. They were having fun and navigating this brave new world with ease. I was in the back seat munching on crow.