When I was counting my medication, I forgot that everything would be closed from Wednesday afternoon through Sunday. We don’t have a lot of 4-day holidays here. They are usually three days at most. Thanksgiving is different. It is always on a Thursday. Pretty much every non-essential business is closed. That doesn’t include everyone. Hospital workers, reporters, entertainers, police, and firefighters work. Retail workers are at their busiest on holidays.

The rest of us, though, are home and that includes family doctors who are not working in hospitals. Mine is home for the holiday. When I was counting out how many pills I had left, I figured I’d call for new prescriptions on Wednesday, forgetting that there wouldn’t be a doctor available until next Monday.

Retirement has made it hard to keep track of the days and quarantining has made it hard for everybody. It turns out that not knowing what day it is isn’t part of being old. It’s part of not having a regular schedule. I often don’t know what day it is unless I look at a calendar. If I wasn’t blogging, I’d probably never know. I might not be sure what month it is. But we have calendars. On the wall, in the computers, and on the phone. These have become my reality checkers.

It’s interesting how electronic devices have crept into our lives, even when we didn’t really want them. Between the three of us, in addition to two full-size laptops, we have three Kindles (two or which we almost never use, but they are there — just in case), an iPad, and and iPhone, and four Alexas (not counting the Kindles which have their own Alexa devices in them, but which I’ve never activated.

The Alexa devices have turned out to be convenient. I don’t use them to monitor the doorbell or adjust the lighting, but I use them to play music, hear the news, check on delivery from Amazon. They make great alarm clocks and the new one I’m getting has a clock in it so I can finally get rid of the bedroom clock that takes up half of our bookcase cum headboard. It has a CD player in it, but I haven’t used it in so long, I’m not even sure it works anymore. With the addition of music on the Alexas, I think our CD collection is going to become slightly extinct, too.

I don’t like trusting so much of my life to the vagaries of Charter Communications. If that connection goes down, nothing will work. Not the telephone, television (or the device that lets us watch streaming stations), music, calendars. Everything is hooked into a single wi-fi connection from one provider, because that’s all the town allows us to have. I am sure someone got paid off.

If you want to talk about how quickly our modern world could end, just eliminate wi-fi and suddenly, everything stops.

I fought it. I really did, but somehow, as the years rolled by, the “connected” life crept up on us. One computer at a time, one electronic reader at a time. “Smart” devices make us all stupid. I used to remember directions and telephone numbers. Now I count on my phone to do my remembering. But at least I finally have an electronic scrabble game and a bridge game. That’s something, right?

Categories: Anecdote, Computers, Computers, Technology, Wi-Fi

Tags: Alexa, computers, Kindles, Marilyn Armstrong, Wi-Fi