It’s a bad time to be an old person, and it’s getting worse
- col-teri-stein
- April 12, 2025
- 799
We consider ourselves fairly intelligent people, but let’s face it: Technology is fast outpacing our ability to learn. It’s particularly bad when technology rears its ugly head in things you need to use nearly every day like your vehicle.
It’s enough to make us want to buy a classic low-tech vehicle from the 1960s or 1970s — a vehicle anyone can work on with a few tools. When a big repair was going on back then, all the guys in the neighborhood stopped by to hang out in your garage. There were no cellphones or social media, so it’s still a mystery how the word spread so fast.
We recently took a few days off and traveled to Port Clinton, one of our favorite spots on Lake Erie. On one day we were going to drive to Tony Packo’s Cafe in Toledo. Their specialty is hot dogs, and the restaurant was made famous on the television show “M.A.S.H.”
It’s incredible how many famous people have visited there and left their autograph on a hot dog bun including my favorites — The Monkees, Peter Frampton, Mr. T, Dan Fogelberg, Billy Joel and more.
We hadn’t been on a multi-day trip out of town for a while, so, of course, the weather was not going to cooperate. Huge thunderstorms with torrential rain were forecast. We started out at the time it was supposed to end, but we apparently missed a weather update. Rain was still coming down in sheets, the roads were water covered and lightning was spiking straight down from the sky all around us.
I wanted to go back to the hotel; things were great at the hotel. They had a delicious breakfast bar with tons of options. They had hot water available for tea 24 hours a day. It was so convenient. They had a nice exercise room and a pool and hot tub.
Joe was undeterred. He recalled all the trips we took 40 years ago when we had bad weather, and we were fine. We also were much more energetic and probably still young and stupid.
It was a tech problem that turned him around. He had a map and voice directions program in the truck he had never used before, and the voice part wasn’t working. We arrived back at the hotel parking lot.
Joe immediately began doing everything he could think of to fix the problem, making sure the volume was up and I’m not sure what all. An hour later it still wasn’t working. The storm hadn’t let up either.
I could tell Joe was giving up, so I got on my phone and started looking for possible solutions to the problem. I was reading about a woman who couldn’t get the voice directions to work on her program. It sounded promising. Helpful people posted things to do, which we tried, and then when I read through the feed, none of those suggestions had worked. Her program just started working on its own a few days later.
We had just killed another hour, so as a last resort, we drove the short half-mile to the local car dealership.
A competent-looking young man, who told Joe he thought he could fix the problem in two seconds, climbed into the driver’s seat. The youngster listened carefully until our radio sound cut out slightly for a nonexistent voice command, and then he turned up the volume knob on our truck and it was fixed.
It was noon, but we took off for the restaurant because it was only about 45 minutes away and it had quit storming.
Things were going well on the highway when the new map and directions program pops up with an alert. Police have been spotted ahead — by two different drivers. What?
Is this the high-tech version of the 1970s citizens band radios? There was a big trucker culture going on then. Listen to the song “Convoy” by C.W. McCall for all you need to know. Many people had CB radios in their vehicles, which they used to report where the state patrol officers, or as they called them “bears,” were watching for speeders.
We looked ahead, and a state patrol vehicle with flashing lights was ahead of a work zone to slow down drivers. Two other buttons popped up. One said, “still there,” and another indicated the scene was clear.
I touched the “still there” button. We can use technology to help other people stay safe.
As we sat enjoying our lunch, we were grateful another tech crisis had been averted. With technology ever changing, we can’t even get two cellphones that work alike. It’s a bad time to be an old person, and it will definitely get worse.