Geezer Computers

There is a short essay by Mireille Silcoff in today’s NY Times Magazine that is phenomenally topical to my present situation. Its title is “The Memory Problem; Which will last longer, the old man or his old computer?” Although the grandfather in question is a tad my senior (he is 102), he has been plagued by the failure of his 1998 iMac and it was giving him that old-man disease; conniptions. My computer isn’t all that old (an HP desktop I bought in, I think, about 2005) but it is still on a downward slope and plagued with various viruses (probably) and conniption-causing corruptions.

Encouraged by a friend’s generous gift-card to Best Buy I took the plunge this week and bought the very latest version of the computer I had gotten so familiar with over the last semi-decade. The young man who waited on me at BB was actually very impressed by the fact I actually owned a working computer that old and, being an inveterate geezer, I had to explain to him that my generation fully expected all appliances, etc., to last at least 25 years with no malfunctions. It is to laugh; which is exactly what he did. His generation (it’s a stretch to think he might be 21) seems to think it’s normal (and okay!) when a piece of equipment, especially electronica, becomes obsolete within a couple of years (or months).

The point of this is that the granddaughter-author of the essay kept putting off buying grandpa a new computer because, hey, nobody expected him to outlive it. Even now, although she doesn’t say so, she can’t see the forest for the trees and paid a ton of money to get his old iMac fixed, rather than buying him an upgrade for half the price. So he continues to write his “vignettes” (his word--which I translate into “blogs”) and is humming happily ever after; entertaining himself and his extended family with a lot of lumpy prose. To quote from Ms. Silcoff’s essay, “This is a man’s lifeline. He was born in 1908. He is my hero.” Amen.