Back in the Olden Days...

“Back in the olden days,” I used to say to my nephews and nieces… and so began my story. It started out as tongue in cheek. Maybe they’d expressed surprise at one of our old-fashioned household gadgets, or lost the remote control. “Back in the olden days,” I’d say, “we used to have a TV with buttons on it. We would get up and walk over to it and push a button. Then the picture would appear and we could watch TV.” I’d also act as interpreter for one of Mom’s stories, since they predated mine by a good thirty years; but I’d heard them often, and could tell the kids what she meant. Her stories usually started out, “Back in them days,” or “Back when we lived on the mountain…” Sand Mountain, Alabama, really did seem like an olden culture, of a faraway kind that Rod Serling might have transported us to. So, when Mom started talking, I'd butt in with, “That’s another name for a mule,” or “it’s a coal-burning stove,” to help the kids when they got that distant, puzzled look. My poor mother is over eighty now, and life in the olden days really does seem olden now. Technology has passed her by, and nothing irritates her more than “them kids a-tweetin’ on their Twitters” all the time. One day, in the middle of my olden-day story, I realized that “olden days” was no longer ironic. My explanation of a thing had entailed two or three other definitions to back up the original one. This was many years after the date that my nephew had looked at me in surprise and said, “They had record players back then?!” (“Yes,” I had explained. “We used dinosaur teeth for the needles.”) I had not had to explain to him what a record player was, or a needle. We still had that frame of reference in common. My only consolation in knowing that I had crossed over some threshold into the truly “olden days,” was that my nieces were now carrying on the tradition. One day my 25-year-old niece came in looking bewildered. “You’ll never guess what my kids never heard of!” (talking about her classroom). That’s the day she began her first story with, “Back in the olden days…”

See, that's why I hate technology... !

A rather terrifying thing... I'd just spent half the night updating my blog labels ~ streamlining, deleting. Maybe I made my blog less navigable, but there was a gist to it. I thought I might switch gears, broaden the theme of the blog. Well, really ~ I just got tired of tech stuff. That was the theme of this blog: Internet history. Just my own personal history ~ the 'Net and all things tech-y.

At one time, I needed this blog. That's how it all started, as therapy. I wanted to tell how I started my first web page: all the trials and tribulations of building it. The frustration of not being able to make the Web do what I wanted it to do. I wanted to tell about brick walls and detours; the many things I've learned. I wanted a record, too. I was tracking down a memory, wasn't sure when I'd changed a host or somesuch.

I also needed to tell how a certain forum had impacted my life ~ in a good way ~ and how really rotten it was when the forum just... went away (back when About.com trimmed the fat off their list of topics and fired all those guides).

I guess the therapy worked. I got over it. I got side-tracked. The need to tell my story has faded away. It doesn't seem so important now. I grew tired of the theme. I'd been thinking, for some time, why not let the blog be about all things dinosaur-ish? not just tech.

And now to the terrifying thing...

I'd double-checked and deleted a couple of obscure labels ~ just cleaning up a bit. Then it happened. I clicked the "Posts" button. No posts appeared. "There are no posts," it said. No posts. 117 posts, gone in an instant. Into the twilight zone. That's what I thought. I clicked again. Nothing.

Well, if it had been a permanent delete, it wouldn't be the first time. That's how life is, in the Age of Technology. Thankfully, the posts were not gone. The blog was not wiped clean. It was just a gremlin, one of those bizarre little glitches, a momentary fluke. But it might have been truly terrifying. Not for the rest of the world, of course. Just for me. The Lone Blogger. I don't even know why anymore. Computers! How they've simplified our lives... (Ahem. How they were supposed to, that is.)