#187 Home Texting

Perhaps children are getting more sophisticated in this generation. I watch them adapt almost instantly to a new technology like, say, text messaging, while us oldsters are still trying to figure out how to work the scroll wheel on our mouse. Perhaps there is some hardwiring window in our brains, like language learning, where if you don’t so it by a certain age tits a heck of a lot harder to learn after. Like two year olds immersed in a foreign language, all those cheat codes and joystick twitchings they learned in early video games are standing them in good stead today. Meanwhile, old folks like me who actually used to laboriously dial a single number around a phone at a time can’t quite pick up one button representing numerous letters numbers and syllables.
You know you’re getting old when a new tech company puts out an intuitive interface and you have no intuition at all about what you’re interfacing with. Intuitive, hell, you haven’t a clue. Intuition has to have a reference base. If I have a feeling that the guy coming down the street is a danger, it’s because my subconscious has assembled numerous clues—posture, stance, smell, expression—into a acute fear package. It’s not like the intuition is a direct message—text or otherwise—from a god. So when they say intuitive, I always ask, intuitive to whom? Fuddy-duddy me, or the cybergeneration?
I’m not convinced corporate America really gets youth a lot of the time anyhow, or I’m completely out of touch with the young. I heard a commercial for a new pizza from one of the home-bake chains. It’s funny isn’t it, how in our rush-rush work-work society the idea of home cooking is so idealized. Even if you’re cooking someone else’s raw stuff at your home.
So anyhow this pizza place is talking about a new pizza and it has roasted onions—apparently they can cook one part of it—and various meats and vegetables on it. In the ad, they announce it to kids and they all shout out in pleasure. Have kids changed that much? When I was in the pizza business, there were three kid choices: pepperoni, Canadian bacon and pineapple, and plain cheese. That’s it. No onions, roasted or otherwise, no green peppers, and no mushrooms or exotic fungus of any kind. Perhaps children are getting more sophisticated in everything, including their collective palate. But somehow I don’t think so. It’s like I used to tell my own Dad when he tried to dress hip in the 70s. It’s Murphy’s Law, Papa, just when you think you got it right is when you go the most wrong. Maybe one of you kids should text in a complaint.
America, ya gotta love it.