Your Computer and Television Please?

So I’ve been thinking lately which in of itself is dangerous but give me a little slack. I want to propose a completely hypothetical situation and make you think yourself about just how you would or even could handle it. Let’s assume that this circumstance would be nationwide and affect everyone from Bill Gates down to minimum wage employee.

Here it is: In an instant we are completely and simultaneously separated from both our computers and our televisions. Now before you just shut down and close this think about it…I mean really think about it. I do realize that there are a group of people that would be mostly unaffected by losing their televisions and perhaps even jubilant about it. How would these same people feel about losing their computers?

I will speak for myself in how this technological void would affect me. I pay a majority of my bills online now so that would cost me a fortune in postage alone. It would mean if I had a question about something, I would have to actually open up an encyclopedia. Let’s think about how e-mail has become such an integral component of how we communicate both personally and in business. How in the world would we be informed about the weather? How about hurricanes and being able to prepare? If one of your answers is the newspaper good luck on that one. Our paper here seems to more and more mail in their columns or so called news stories and they always seem to be a few days behind most events. (Kind of like putting a sign up on your street saying “you just hit a bump”)

The computer has become not only a venue for playing games or socializing but has also become almost instrumental to the way many of us function. It has taken this large sphere we live on and made almost everything in this life instantaneous. This unfortunately has also created a whole society of impatient people who not only take for granted that they can find out immediately how sharks defecate but expect it. Think about the last time you were on Facebook and your computer froze. It probably ruined your day. We are literally attached with a lifeline to our computers.

Television might seem the easier of the two to give up. I invite you to really give that some thought as well. Many of us are entertained quite a few hours of our day by TV. (Yes Jim I know some don’t give a wit) Listening to conversation at work or even on Facebook you would think that we live and die by television. I would have to be honest here and tell you without TV it would take some getting used to. I am beginning to read more. Perhaps that’s the law for folks as they get older. Television by enlarge is a younger person’s medium. All you need to do is watch the commercials. About the only thing for older folks are the Viagra commercials and the History channel which by the way I would really miss.

How about how some parents would have to actually entertain their children besides planting them in some sort of prison-like little chair and putting them into a pupils dilated trance by the glow of Barney. I remember distinctly as a child being in a Bugs Bunny trance for most of my young age. The cartoons these days are just psychotic if you ask me. I like simple cartoons but them I am a simple man in many respects.

How would we survive without infomercials? I would have never found out what a supreme waste of money the Topsey Turvey planter is, for instance. Billy Mays would not have had a career or the Geico Gecko would have been out of a job. How would the car manufacturers waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising?

I think my point is being made here. I surmise if terrorists really wanted to bring our great country to a grinding halt, all they would need to do is confiscate our computers and televisions and we would certainly then be ripe for the picking!