Winding a Watch

Some recent observations jogged my mind as to how times have changed.


Our family found ourselves scrambling one night to find enough wrist watches for Jordan and Jared to take their tests (LSAT and SAT respectively) the next day. The watches were needed to help them manage their time while taking the tests. Most test sites require you to turn the cell phones off during the test. Apparantly most of the younger generation do not wear watches. So how do they know the time? Every cell phone has the time displayed on its screen,. You should have seen the look on Jared’s face when I was trying to describe to him my watch that is set automatically from signals sent from Greenwich. It was like “why?”

We took a family trip up to San Jose for a wedding last weekend. One of the advantages of kids growing up is that you have multiple drivers taking shifts driving up the I5. I was watching as Jeff settled into the drivers seat, he made the usual adjustments of the seat, steering wheel and mirrors. But then he pulled out his Ipod and plugged it in. It was then I remembered Jordan and I doing the exact same thing. We all have our Ipods with our own selection of music programmed in. This is in addition to Jared in the back of the van with his headphones on connected to his Ipod. This did give Gayle a sampling of what everyone listens to as she never budged from the front passenger seat. And yes it was revealing to hear what they listen to.

At work, all of us are tied to our computers, We type up our own reports, email is the common mode of communication and the company has a version of Instant Messaging. But the younger co workers are able to interact with their content more than me. I for some reason have trouble reviewing spreadsheets and documents on a computer screen and prefer to kill a tree and print them out to read. I then take the hard copy all over the company reading, editing and forgetting where I left them. I then come back to my office computer to final edit. Everyone else either logs on to another computer or somehow looks it up on their Iphone.

I used to take the time to figure out technical problems. If the computer went down, I spent time figuring out why it’s not working and attempting to fix it. When Gayle starts yelling for help at 2am in the morning, we all silently lay in our beds seeing who she grabs first. It was like when we were new parents, it was a game of chicken to see who would get up out of bed to change the baby. If I have trouble with a program now, I yell for Jared and the boys scatter and hide.


By the way, they now have You Tube on how to wind a watch.