Technology is Stupid

One morning recently I was listening to the rain falling outside my window and, for some stupid reason, I decided to hop on my phone to check The Weather Channel app.  Shockingly, it said it’s raining!  (In my defense, the animated rain falling from the animated clouds is kind of cool.)  I thought to myself, technology really is stupid sometimes, and it reminded me of a similar moment a friend of mine recently had with her husband, so here’s my Technology is Stupid story.

My friend Lauren was in LA with her husband Richard.  (In my world, LA is anywhere south of Thousand Oaks and north of Irvine.)  So, they were somewhere in that LA abyss and they were driving to a mall.  Richard was trying to check the traffic app on his phone, while he was driving, which was upsetting Lauren to no end.  Seeing he was upsetting his wife, Richard proceeded to try and tell her how to check the traffic app for him.  So now, not only is he trying to negotiate an LA freeway, but now he has added handing his phone off to his wife to the chaos, along with explaining to Lauren how the app works.  Mind you, Lauren is still sportin’ a flip phone (gasp!) and could really care less about traffic apps and pretty much anything else that has to do with “smart phones.”  She thinks it’s all pretty much useless and silly.  Frustrated and seriously feeling that her safety was at stake at this point, she snapped:  “Put the stupid phone down, Richard, and look out the window…there’s traffic.  See?  It’s right there, you don’t need your stupid phone to tell you we are stuck in traffic!” 

She’s right, of course she is, but Richard is a bit stung by the outburst (he was, after all, only trying to be helpful).  Needless to say, they drove the rest of the way to the mall in silence.  Still mad when they arrived, Lauren decided she didn’t even want to walk with Richard into the mall, so she proceeded to mess around with her purse for a minute or two; he, on the other hand, had immediately hopped out of the car and started heading toward the mall entrance.  Feeling enough time had passed, Lauren got out of the car and took off in the opposite direction, figuring they would just meet up at the store they were there for in the first place, which, ironically enough was, you guessed it, the Apple store.  So Lauren gets to the Apple store, and there’s no Richard.  She hangs out for a while and still no Richard.  Realizing things have gone too far, she calls him (yes, on her archaic flip phone).  Turns out, he’s at the entrance to the mall waiting for her!  So…a big fat fight over some stupid technology.  In the end they were, luckily, able to enjoy a good laugh about it.

Every now and then I catch myself in situations like this and I think about Lauren and Richard and I am reminded that you don’t need technology to tell you it’s raining.  You don’t need it to tell you there’s traffic.  You simply need to look out the window!