Have you thought of this? If your house catches on fire, what would you try to save? Just about everyone I know says they would get their loved ones and then try to save their pictures or scrapbooks. They want to save those memories.
At my house, the scrapbooks, old-school annuals and other memorabilia are on a shelf and some cabinets below the shelves. What a collection. My dad must have thought that I was changing my looks every two minutes.
He took enough pictures of me. Years later, I must have thought my children were doing the same thing. I took enough pictures of them.
I got into photography and really loaded up on all sorts of pictures. Not so much anymore. I have a friend that got into photography about the same time they became enamored with Clemson football. They have 10 years' worth of pictures taken inside the stadium. All the pictures look the same. Most of the people are dressed in orange and it looks like the inside of a stadium on game day.
Well, let’s get to the point of this column. Now all these phosdtos can be stored on your telephone. How about all the photography equipment? I used to have a camera with a couple of lenses and a tripod and a bag to carry all this stuff. Speaking of phones, I had a big answering machine that would record messages from people if I weren’t home to answer my phone. Of course, now you don’t ever go anywhere without your phone and it will record messages, too.
Do you still listen to music? I bet you had a record player. You were loaded down with albums and 45s. How about eight track tapes or cassettes for the car? You probably had a carrying case for all the tapes as well. If you pile all this stuff up on a table, it is quite a haul.
Don’t get started on books at my house. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to get all the books loaded up.
Now you get the idea. These little phones that are carried around have all this stuff stored inside it. Think of it. You have 4000 pieces of music in a tiny little phone. In the back of your mind, you are still worried about losing it. There is one song on you phone that took you forty years to find. You could hum the song but not remember all the words. Now you have it.
The song is 50 years old, and if you lose it, it may take another 40 years to find it again.
Your phones now hold 10,000 volumes of books. It has the computing power to have an expedition to Mars. The pressure is mounting. You haven’t done any research to further your academic prowess and you haven’t read any books either.
What is worse? Having all these books to read and not reading them, or the thought of losing all this information?
No wonder some of my friends are freaking out about their phones. Just about everything in the world that is important to them is on a phone. They might be better off if their house burned down rather than losing the phone.
It’s hard to lose your old record player and 100 albums. I’m not worried about someone stealing the dozens of scrapbooks when I’m not at home.
A phone can be lost in plain sight. I have one friend that is rather forgetful. She claims she walks around her house looking for her phone and it is in her hand the whole time. She is worried about some recipes for the upcoming holidays.The phones have caused us to put all our eggs in one basket. It’s okay to have all your eggs in one basket if you watch the basket. Maybe we should just chill out a little bit and take a break from worrying about all the things we have on a phone and create something different in our minds.
Bobby Jonte is the president of the Bank of Greeleyville.
