By Madeline Lau
The New Year inevitably brings with it a barrage of resolutions and changes, some good, some bad, some totally awesome.
In addition to my own resolution, designed to bring more joy to my life (very simply: dance more), it turns out my father had a little trick up his sleeve for 2011.
Cautiously, and almost palpably nervously, he recently broached the subject of upgrading… to…. high speed Internet. Stop the presses!
I understand well enough that this is a pretty mundane conversation for any normal father to be having with his daughter. Just about every family I know has already had high speed Internet, with WiFi, streaming through their houses since the beginning of time.
What you don’t know, unless you’re a close family friend or one of the people he regularly visits at Roth’s IGA, is that my father is one of the last stalwart protectors of antiquated and, almost always, extremely inconvenient “technology” usually at his family’s expense.
This is a man who owns thousands of eight track tapes (remember those from the ’70s?), drools over the image of a reel-to-reel track spinning away, and still manages to find parts for his 1973 Chevrolet Caprice station wagon.
Really, I saw him order brake hoses this morning.
In addition to relics from a bygone, and more clunky, era, my father is also the proud owner of not one, but three, bizarre Lau family collections of weird inventions and tools, passed down by his father and uncle like a rusty family legacy that overflows in our cupboards and closets.
Suffice it to say, he’s got a lot of funky stuff lying around, and with it, the never-dying appreciation for technology long ago deemed “outdated” by the rest of society.
This is why for the past 10 years we have been using my sister’s 1997 Dell desktop operating on Windows ’95 with dial-up Internet.
We are probably one of the last houses in America that you can still call and get an endless ring tone while my dad dithers away on Craigslist.
When I say “we” I really mean “he” because when anyone other than my father tries to use this lethargic dinosaur to say, check an email, he or she becomes so enraged and frustrated from waiting 10 minutes for pages to load, that he or she just claims incommunicado status for lack of connection speed.
Thank goodness I have a Smart phone with the capability to surf the web, otherwise I would be trapped in my dad’s thoroughly created web of techno-silence until I whipped out the eight tracks and starting asking for an ’78 Buick.
No longer!
The wheels of change are turning (very usually a result of enough coercing from my mother) and the hint of an upgrade wafts tastily in the future.
He had me do some market research, determining best deal, and found out that what is offered here in Stayton is only $4 more than his cranky, indolent dial-up system now.
There is hope; and with it the promise of the world at my fingertips only accessible through Internet exploration.
Be kind, gods of the New Year’s resolutions, and let this one work out, I beg you, before I take matters into my own hands and attack the computer myself!
