God Save Whoever-the-Hell This Is

As regular readers might recall I had to buy a new cellphone while I was out in California because I spilled a glass of wine on my old phone and it reacted like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy gave her the first bath of her life.

(Never thought about it before now, but the Wicked Witch must have had some killer B.O. which is probably why she had to resort to employing monkeys…they were the only ones who didn’t think she smelled bad.)

Anyway…

Apparently, cellphone designers have to justify their continued employment by “improving” the last model, so they move stuff around and change how you do things and the end result of all this “improving” was me not being able to figure out how to make my new phone talk to me and give me verbal directions while I traveled from I-80 in Wyoming to I-70 in Kansas and I really needed those verbal directions because the state of Colorado has set up an Under-Construction-Obstacle-Course on I-25 which includes driving down back alleys in Fort Collins and some really horseshit signage that lets you know just what lane you need to be in about 75 yards after you need to be in it.

Nevertheless…

After making some random travel decisions that somehow turned out OK, I made it back to KC, but figured I should get this Google Maps issue corrected. Unfortunately, nothing I saw on-line showed me how to do that, which is how I wound up back at my local Target store.

That’s where I bought the phone out in California and I figured the Target Tech people would know how to make my phone talk to me.

Semi-related anecdote

Back when I still worked at the Kansas City Star and the internet and social media were first becoming a big thing, someone up the Editorial Food Chain decided absolutely everybody needed to have a blog to show we were “hip and with it” and they provided a blog platform that all us “hip/with it” people didn’t know how to use with the possible exception of maybe one guy in IT.

But as a fellow Star employee pointed out; if you were really, really great at setting up websites and blogs, would your first choice as a place of employment be a newspaper?

So you had maybe one over-worked guy slowly setting up our blogs one-by-one and he’d maybe get to setting up yours somewhere around the 12th of Never and meanwhile I had an editor asking just where the hell my blog was and how soon it would be on-line.

That being the case, I asked one of my kids if he knew how to set up a blog and he said he didn’t know anything about that and I said I’d give him $50 and take him out to lunch at the restaurant of his choice if he’d at least try and he said:

“Well…I could take a look at it.”

I took him to work with me so he could “take a look at it” and by about 11:15 he wanted to know if we could go to lunch early because my blog was all set up and ready to use.

After my blog unexpectedly appeared on-line I got asked how I managed to pull that off and I said if the Kansas City Star wanted to get all these blogs on-line right away they should kidnap a bunch of teenagers and lock them in a room with a year’s supply of Cool Ranch Doritos and a case of Mountain Dew and tell them they’d be released from captivity once all the blogs were set up and we’d be good to go by rush hour.

We used to have kids to help us work the farm and we needed about seven of them because three would die from a disease or a farm-equipment-related mishap or get eaten by a bear on the way to school.

Now we have kids so our microwave doesn’t say “12:00…12:00…12:00” for the rest of our lives.

Experience has taught me that when you have a technology-related problem, find a kid.

The Target Tech Department

So I’m walking back to the “Tech” department in Target and an older woman (which probably means she’s five years younger than me) is talking to a young man and young woman and sees me walking up and says: “He’ll know the answer.”

To which I say: “I doubt it.”

She then asks me if I know who Queen Elizabeth is and I say I do. She then points to the young woman and says: “She doesn’t know who Queen Elizabeth is and didn’t recognize her picture.”

But I’m thinking: “Why should she?”

The young woman is A. Hispanic B. Latina or C. Whatever-The-Current-Politically-Correct-Term-Is and she’s maybe 23 and in her short lifetime, what has Queen Elizabeth ever done that changed this young woman’s world?

So I say we’re all living in our own universe and advise the young A. Hispanic B. Latina or C. Whatever-The-Current-Politically-Correct-Term-Is woman to name someone the older woman won’t know.  

I add that my son is a music producer and I’ve come to realize there’s a world full of famous people that I don’t know anything about and I could get on an elevator with Young Thug or Migos or Fetty Wap and have absolutely no idea who they were and even after you told me, I still wouldn’t care.

Then the older woman says: “But Queen Elizabeth has been all over the news.”

And I say: “All over the news you watch.”

My kids get their news from the internet and podcasts and to get them to watch the PBS News Hour you’d have to tie them to a chair, point a gun at their heads and tell them the alternative is binge-watching The Lawrence Welk Show.

After thirty seconds, they’d be putty in your hands.

We’re all living in our own world

A comedian whose name currently escapes me once made the observation that when you drive down the highway everybody else is driving too fast or too slow.

We tend to think we’re “normal” and anyone who comes to a different conclusion is wrong and that observation about driving also applies to pretty much every other subject:

• We think we have the right religion (or lack of one) and everybody else is worshipping the wrong God.

• We think we have just the right amount of interest in sex and everybody else is a pervert or frigid.

• We think we listen to the right music and everybody else has bad taste.

The tendency to think we’re right and normal and everybody else is wrong or weird has led to a lot of the World’s Problems which (let’s admit it) is kinda rich coming from someone who expresses his opinions pretty much every day and ridicules people who disagree with him.

Trust me, I’ve had to think about that and here’s where I’ve wound up:

I’m not telling anyone else what to think; I’m telling people what I think and if that makes sense to them great. If they think something different, that’s their right.

Mostly I’m OK with letting people reach their own conclusions about life, but if they conclude that White people are better than non-White people or Christians are better than Jews or Donald Trump needs a second term in the White House, then we’re going to butt heads.

We all have to decide where to draw the head-butting line, but I’m not going to butt heads with someone because she doesn’t know who Queen Elizabeth is.

So I ask if the Current Events Quiz is now over and tell the young A. Hispanic B. Latina or C. Whatever-The-Current-Politically-Correct-Term-Is woman what my problem is and she starts tapping shit and moving things around and about 15 seconds later my phone is now willing to give me verbal directions and before I depart I say to the older woman:

“She may not know who Queen Elizabeth is, but she just kicked my phone’s ass.”

The young A. Hispanic B. Latina or C. Whatever-The-Current-Politically-Correct-Term-Is woman fist bumps me and says:

“I like this guy.”

Conclusion (and feel free to reach a different one)

I semi-recently read an article about Queen Elizabeth’s death and they interviewed someone from India and he didn’t seem all that broken up about it and maybe that’s because India has had a different experience with the British monarchy.

If you grow up poor and Black in Compton, you’re probably going to experience a different America than some kid who grows up rich and White in Beverly Hills and reach different conclusions about your country.

We’re all experiencing life in different ways and coming to different conclusions and while I’m not OK with someone being a Ku Klux Klan member, I am OK with someone who finds Queen Elizabeth irrelevant.

Especially if she can make my phone work.