Dr. Dobb's Journal January, 2005
As I write this, the U.S. Presidential election still hasn't been decided, so it's not clear yet how badly the polling pros have flubbed it by missing all those trendy people who no longer have land-line phones. Of course, the pollsters missed 10 times as many harried citizens who refused to pick up their land-line phones, refused to answer any questions, or attached eardrum-damaging noisemakers to their phones to discourage the incessant canvassing and polling calls. It's hard to believe that you can get a representative sample of the electorate by talking only to the bored and lonely, but I'm not a professional pollster.
I spoke vaguely just then of "those" people who have forsaken tethered phones for the cell-phone-only lifestyle, but I was taken aback to discover the other day that I have become one of them. When I mentioned to my partner Nancy that no messages had been left on our home answering machine for several days, she explained, "that's because I canceled our service a week ago."
Granted, her office and mine (with land-line phones) are just across the driveway from our house and we spend most of our waking hours in our offices, even eating most of our meals in the same building (Nancy's business is a restaurant). But I was still a little disoriented to have been inducted without my knowledge into this trendy group. I'm usually only ahead of the curve when it leads down a blind alley, like my quixotic detour into Newton software development.
Also, I'm supposed to be in charge of all technology in our relationship, just as Nancy is in charge of selecting the wine to have with dinner.
The whole no-land-line experience made me pause to assess where I fell on other current tech trend lines. Behind the curve? Ahead of the curve? Or in the ditch, flies buzzing around my eyes, blood on my saddle?
Take computers. I just bought a new desktop machine, and like the rest of the machines on our office network, it's as untethered as a first-time voter. Not only is it networked via Wi-Fi, its mouse and keyboard, Bluetooth devices both, rest in ghostly disconnectedness on my desktop. No monitor cable, either: The pretty display that Nancy's employees mistake for the monitor is the whole magilla. You've deduced by now that I'm talking about an Apple iMac G5. I know, owning a second-tier Apple computer loses me some geek points, but there's no denying that it is a trendy machine.
But in this post-PC era, personal computers are a poor place to look for real trendiness. After all, in a blatant example of trendy tail wagging dragging dog, Apple markets this computer as being "from the makers of the iPod." And do I have an iPod? No. I hardly have any portable devices at all, except for a Wi-Fi finder, which lets me feel like a warblogger. But I'm not a warblogger, and I've downloaded exactly one song in the past year, which I paid for. Not trendy.
It's even harder to stay trendy in one's online presence. I turned my personal web site into some semblance of a blog a while back, but unless you're running a wiki, you're hopelessly behind the curve, so color me behind. I think ideally I should be podcasting, if I knew exactly what that was.
Then there's television. Television is trendy again—not watching it, but owning the hot hardware. But my household is stuck back in the 20th Century, TVwise. No DTV, no plasma screen, no TiVo. We don't even have (can I really admit this?) a DVD player. We can burn 'em, but we can't play 'em. On the other hand, ours is a satellite-only household: We haven't watched broadcast television in years.
Does any of this really matter? Over dinner I asked Nancy if she thought we were missing anything by not embracing all the latest trends. As she mulled it over, she unscrewed the cap from a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and I realized that every profession has its trends to keep up with.