"NO TEXTS DURING SEX"...OR I'VE GOT THE MEAN OLD BOOMER TECHNOLOGICAL BLUES

Hi Friends,

I was taking the subway into Manhattan the other day when a man and a woman - obviously a couple - got into a very loud argument. The subway car was packed with people. Dozing. Staring into space. Listening to their iPods. Some even reading a book (God forbid!). We all tried not to listen to the argument. Impossible. The verbal sparring between the two people escalated. And we heard every word. Most of it unprintable. (America. 2013. Are we not able to  express ourselves without resorting to a string of four-letter words?)  Everyone in that subway car was an unwilling witness to the truly uncomfortable level of venom spewing from the mouths of these two individuals. The barbs came fast and furious, each member of the couple trying to top the other. Finally one of them stood up and -suddenly realizing that there was an audience - turned to the other and shouted:

                          "No texts during sex! No texts during sex! No texts during sex!"

At that moment the car reached Times Square and most of us departed, leaving the combatants to continue their argument. (I must admit - I would have loved to have heard the response to the lines above.)

I did however catch some of the expressions of my fellow passengers when they heard the line. Many of them were nodding. They'd heard it before. Lived it. Hmm. I wondered. Was this now just another issue helping to separate people? Texting during love-making?

Technology. Gadgets. Playthings. Trust me on this one. The legacy of the Boomers will not be the three months of the "Summer of Love". Or the anti-war street demonstrations that in retrospect were merely fashion, something to do with friends, just an excuse to flout authority, party, and socialize.
No...the Boomer legacy will be all of these damned gadgets.

Of course, there are certainly some pluses when tallying up the technological balance sheet. And I acknowledge them.  For example, computers and the Internet permit me - and hundreds of thousands of like-minded individuals - to communicate in writing with all of you. There are no intermediaries in this process. No editor to impress, no publisher to bamboozle. Want to write, communicate - perhaps even enlighten? Present people - strangers - with the opportunity to read your prose? Touch them with your ideas...elicit an emotional response?  Modern technology is the vehicle that permits this to happen.  For those of us who burn with the desire to write but may never have anything published, never formally produce a written product that takes its place in the marketplace - modern technology has been an extraordinarily positive occurrence.

There are other positives of course. For example,  dating after my divorce happened to coincide with the explosion of online dating sites. Giving me a much larger universe in which to search for a soul mate. Ultimately,  I met my very wonderful girlfriend in this manner.  In addition, the computer has allowed me to stay in touch with people across the country and to locate and communicate with old friends I lost touch with decades ago. And of course - technology has allowed me to produce my own music, put instrumentation and vocals to material that for the most part had been sitting in a drawer  - some for years - and send the finished product out to the world. Yesssss!

On-the-other-hand, there are the drawbacks.  There are many. I will list a few. Almost everyone I know who works complains of being bogged down by email. Emails sent through their particular chain-of-commend. Essentially everyone who outranks you has the ability to comment about a particular project or issue and request a written response/action. Without regard to the degree of importance.  Without regard for time constraints. Ignorant of whatever else has to be done. (In-other-words: emails sent in a vacuum.) And - virtually their bosses "beck and call". (Forgive the pun.) Evenings. Weekends. Some say that they spend more time on email than they do on the jobs they are paid to perform (leading to increasing levels of stress and often performance problems.) After all, in the final analysis they are still being evaluated on their ability to do their jobs - not necessarily to read, internalize, and answer a thousand-and-one emails.

Texting? Immediate and constant communication with each and every person who wanders - however slightly - into one's own weird little universe. What is all that texting doing to spinal chords? To fingers? Or - to the ability to communicate in person. (the essence of any good relationship.) Or...to the nation's productivity? I passed by a construction site the other day. The work has been going on for years. Many of the workers were on their cell phone...talking, texting, surfing. Once upon  a time I was  a manager who had to deal with employees who spent more time on personal telephone calls than their assignments...imagine if I had to deal with smart phones?

There are also the additional safety-oriented problems cause by the ability to do web-related tasks via easily accessible hand-held devices. Twice in the past few weeks I have almost killed someone who was walking across a busy road, failing to look and check for oncoming traffic - practically almost walking right into the path of my car when I clearly had the right-of-way - because they were texting as they were walking. (Perhaps not as horrible a crime as texting during sex...but we're speaking about level of degree here.) There was also the guy on the Belt Parkway who almost swerved into my lane as he texted (going sixty-miles per hour - I could see his Android device in his right hand as he grabbed the wheel and swerved back into his own lane). And - my personal favorite - the woman who came careening down a one-way street (the wrong way of course) and narrowly missed crashing into me. (She also missed hitting about three parked cars.) When I lowered my window to speak with her, she gave me a helpless look. "It was the GPS" she said. "It was the fault of the GPS. It said to turn right. So I did." Huh? She blindly followed the directions of the GPS? Failed to look at the street signs or even the direction of the cars parked on the narrow street?   I was flabbergasted.

Finally: there are the parents who spend their every waking hour talking on the cell phone and/or texting their grown-up friends instead of...perish the thought! actually talking to their children or playing a game with them. Or reading to them. A few weeks ago I was in Panera Bread. Sitting next to a family of four. The parents were each on their cell phones texting - the kids on their tablets watching Sponge Bob. What's going on here??  Parenthood for me flushed away the last remnants of the Boomer "Me First" philosophy. My daughter came first. Evidently that was then...this is now. What will the social and educational repercussions be?

I would like to think that the couple arguing in the subway car will somehow resolve their differences (perhaps with the help of therapy). But I doubt it. This is 2013. They'll probably continue to argue via texts. On their cell phones. Through email. Or via Skype.

Or perhaps they will stop talking at all. With not even a four-letter word between them.

That's all for now, see you all soon....please be safe.

Stevenn