Technology advancements

Quick, what is your phone number? The vet’s? The tractor repair shop? The coop feed store? Your kids? No fair looking on your cell phone’s list of contacts or favorites. I‘ll admit I can only recite four out of six family member phone numbers by memory. I’m not going to admit which two numbers I can’t recall; I don’t want to show favoritism. I bet many of us have “forgotten” these numbers due to technology.

Remember when we had thousands of numbers swimming around in our heads at any one time? We exercised our brains every day as we retrieved information from unknown corners of our minds. Who needed to walk their fingers through the yellow pages to find a number? Our minds were mobile information centers, even if our phones weren’t in those days.

By working our brains like an Olympic gymnastics routine, we could keep our marbles in a row. We could connect people and phone numbers together with complete accuracy and deep details. We could list the name of their spouse, kids and possibly parents, as well as directions to their house by just recalling a phone number.

Today’s technology has erased many of those numbers from our minds and softened our recall capacities. I know I’m still the parent, but some of my kids think I might need to have a cognitive test to establish a baseline for future decline. The numbers just don’t pop out like they used to.

I think my problem might be more of an overflowing storage center. I have stuffed away so much information over the years that I’m having a hard time finding places to store new names and information. I might need to “empty” some of the folders in my mind and move them over to the trash bin to create more storage space.

I have discovered I have already cleaned some files due to selective memory loss. I seemed to have misplaced some of the stupid stuff I did in my younger days — and where I laid down my glasses this morning. As long as I still remember I’m married to Mark, life is good.

In my defense, I have noticed something very tricky about the technology: It is like they are trying to make me lose my mind. Looking at your cell phone or touch-tone phone, where is the “1” located? In the upper left corner of the phone. But, on a calculator, numbers end with the “1” in the lower left corner. When I play Sudoku puzzles on the computer using the calculator keyboard, I couldn’t figure out why I was always hitting the wrong numbers. It turns out I was trying to “dial” my numbers instead of “adding” my numbers. You know, if we had never gotten rid of the rotary phone, I wouldn’t have this kind of problem.

Back in high school, high technology was an electric typewriter with correcting tape and a Texas Instruments calculator the size of a paperback book. My kids can’t imagine typing directly on paper and agonizing over every typo they produce, nor can they imagine writing a paper by hand. The only spell check we had was a very thick dictionary or a very talented mother who proofread your papers.

Now the big questions for our grandchildren’s generation are: Can you tie your shoes without Velcro? Can you sign your name in cursive or even read it? Have you memorized your multiplication tables? Can you do the math in your head? When a school principal told me kids didn’t need to know their multiplication anymore because they would use a calculator, I about lost it. How will they know if the answer is wrong because they hit the wrong number on the calculator and they don’t know the possible answer? Of course, I guess they will never get their numbers mixed up because they aren’t dialing phone numbers anymore.

The double-edged sword of technology. I often wonder how we survived without it and how we will survive with it.

As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark Schmitt started an adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota.