I'm convinced that We of a Certain Age are just supposed to stop and have a good laugh at ourselves as we attempt to maneuver through the advanced technology of the day.
Nowhere does that seem to be more the case than when it comes to today's cars. I can't help but remember that hilarious old Andy Griffith monologue, "What It Was, Was Football," in which he portrayed a total hayseed stumbling into his first football game by accident. In this case, what it was, was today's car technology. Remember all the hoopla over the talking cars back in the '80s ("Your headlights are on," "Your door is ajar.") So cute and quaint. Today's cars are the Battlestar Galactica Cylons, making those cars look like Robby the Robot.
If you were ecstatic just to get power windows and doors and a CD player in your last car, boy are you in for some catching up. Here's what I have found, having finally updated the 9-year-old Talkmobile after eight years.
The perfect storm in newfangled car buying comes when (a) indeed, you haven't bought a car since before President Barack Obama took office and (b) you're at an age where you have to find a youngster to teach you to operate your smartphone or turn on your flat-screen TV. Add in an upgrade to a larger-size car, and you instantly become a one-man sideshow. In addition to driving like a 15-year-old student because you're not used to being able to accelerate and brake this easily, you find you have to relearn to parallel park. And you park quite gingerly, period, because all parking spaces will suddenly seem as though they're sized for Yugos and Smart cars.
Chances are you'll need help with the car's Bluetooth technology, but have too much pride to ask a youngster, so you call or text your cronies to find out which ones have the technology so that they can help you. Especially if, as in my case, you got an ex-rental car whose customers all connected their phones to the car, maxing it out per the number of phones it could accommodate ... and you can't figure out how to delete these phones.
Having ridden around in other people's newfangled cars, you know that your updated car's dashboard is going to resemble a starship bridge and that there's going to be a big, rectangular screen in the center that tells you such things as what's on the radio, what iPod or CD songs are playing, whose calls to ignore, and that sort of thing.
In the new Talkmobile, I discovered there's also a little round screen right behind the steering wheel that reveals not only such information as the outside temperature and how many miles I've racked up during a trip, but how many miles I can go before running out of gas (Yea!). By the way, it took me the better part of a day to find the clock right in front of my face. It also took a while to realize there was a whole other set of controls on the steering wheel. I'm taking bets on how long it will be until I stop groping for the dashboard controls.
Today's cars talk too, you'll discover after you see in the manual that the car has Voice Activation, wonder how to activate it and later hit the button by accident. The car talks quite a bit. So much so that you may be tempted to tell it to shut up. You wonder if, at some point, you're going to accidentally call the car Siri.
By the way, your key now looks like something Captain Kirk or Captain Picard carried around on Star Trek. You look at it and know that duplicates won't cost a couple of bucks apiece at the neighborhood hardware store. You call around and sure enough, one duplicate key will cost about the same as a ticket to next week's Steely Dan concert in North Little Rock. You pray that tire-replacement time is a long way off.
Ironically, when I turn my car off, the round screen behind the steering wheel displays "Goodbye." Sarcastically, I wondered why the car didn't just say goodbye.
This is just one of those things that makes us oldsters wonder if change is coming faster or if we've just gotten less flexible when it comes to adjusting to it. Or both. I hear the self-driving-needed cars are fast approaching ... which leaves me not knowing whether to say "Yikes!" or "Hey, can you throw in a food replicator?"
They see ya rollin' ... they emailin' ...
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 06/19/2016