Technophobe

I’ve been somewhat of a technophobe my whole life. I think this phobia partly stems from the fact that we didn’t have a TV growing up and the only records that my mom and dad played were on Sunday morning of the local church group. I just had no exposure to anything technological except my dad playing songs on the organ. I still remember waking up to “When Morning Gilds the Sky” when I was six and I can still sing it by heart. My sister or brother had a John Denver record but I don’t think we were allowed to listen to that because it had “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and my parents were suspicious that John Denver wasn’t Reformed or Dutch enough to really be using God’s name that way. My dad occasionally did let loose with a little Mitch Miller once in a while, although I didn’t know that Miller was a dutch name.

On a side note, when we did get a TV my dad would sneak in when my mom wasn’t looking and we would watch “All Star Wrestling” and my favorite wrestler was Oly Olson, but my dad said no one was better than Gene Kiniski. I found myself thinking that my dad was so brave to be sneaking around watching wrestling when my mom wasn’t looking; the only other time I remember him doing something behind my mom’s back was when he would come and lay beside me in bed to help me fall asleep and we would listen to the Canucks game on the radio. Whenever my mom would come down the hallway, given away by the creaking floor, I had to turn it down right away and we would both pretend we were sleeping. During the commercials I would ask my dad trivia questions or I would make up jokes about hockey team names. When my dad took us ice skating at Moody Park every Saturday night at 6:30 I would skate around the ice pretending I was Jim Robson calling out the names of the players I heard on the radio that week: “Here come Lever, over to Snepts, back to Seldebauer and Seldebauer scores…”



Once I discovered we owned a tape recorder that had a microphone and I would go around and ask people to pretend to be someone famous. I remember my brother-in-law doing a Leon Spinks impersonation (Leon Spinks upset Muhammed Ali for the boxing title in the late 1970’s) or someone would pretend to do the play-by-play for the Canucks and it always ended with “and Guevernmont scores!” I somehow figured out that you could put the microphone to the radio and tape songs, but it was always hard to know when the song was going to end and the DJ was going to start talking. I would play that music on the old Phillips tape recorder as I played hockey in the driveway. Nothing screamed cool more than listening to Billy Joel through a tape recorder while pretending to be Chris Oddleifson or Pit Martin.



My neighbor Eddie had Intellivision and my other neighbor friends who were brothers, Cory and Tyler, had Atari. I tried as hard as I could to get myself invited over as much as possible in the hopes of playing these sinful games. If I had to choose one over the other, my heart says Atari, but that was mostly because Cory and Tyler also got Wrestling magazines with large pictures of Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart and the “The Iran Shiek.” Those magazines also had pictures of scantily clad woman but I knew that I had to turn the pages really quick when I came to those because those pictures could lead to kissing. (If you love intellivision,check this out).



I don’t really know how to end this blog entry. This certainly isn’t a blog entry to talk about how technology is having such a negative impact on teens today—I think it is no different than 30 years ago—it will impact a person negatively if one allows that. We make simple rules such as “no ipod in the car” unless it has the radio transmitter and we can all listen, and each child gets 20 minutes on the computer a day. I don’t know if it works, it feels like a victory to put limits on these things, but I have no idea if these small rules will lead to any major revelations or transformation in their life. But maybe it is just to show them and us that technology doesn’t have to control them.

Maybe it should bother me that my daughter shows me how to download nerdy sermons onto the family ipod even though “you are the only one who really listens to that stuff” but I kind of chuckle that they can be patient-and even proud-that they can show me how to download songs or leave screen saver messages on my cell phone (“Go Canucks Go”).In all areas of life, not just technology, there is something healthy when you can say to a child “I need a little help with this, can you show me how it works.” There are no hockey games on the radio, but maybe I will sneak down to their room when Bev isn’t looking and we will share earphones and listen to a new song on the ipod. That is if they can show me how it works.