Have your gotten a post yet from some of your favorite millennials which shows a photo of them aged to look like they are “old?”
The quotes are there because, as millennials will discover, “old” is a moving target. Right now many of them think 40 is ancient.
It’s from a new app. An app is either an abbreviation for “application” or the last part of the word you say when they refuse to work.
The app “ages” you in a photo. It’s been the subject of some controversy during the week when someone found out using it lets personal information be seen and leaves you vulnerable to hackers.
I’m not worried about that. I figure privacy has become a concept as outmoded as civility.
I swear the other morning I turned on my television and it said “you left your glasses on the nightstand...and please put on some pants.”
This may have been a dream.
What wasn’t a dream was when I heard some Dallas radio personalities one day expressing the apparently growing concern that when you leave your Amazon “Alexa”—or those other Star Trek-voiced devices—on all the time it listens to you and is gathering info.
One said he and his wife were discussing getting a Barbie dollhouse as a child’s gift. Thought Alexa was dormant.
Next time he used his “personal electronic devices” he was inundated with ads and offers for, yep, Barbie doll houses.
But my problem with the aging app is not that it goes too far. It doesn’t go far enough.
Changes in appearance are just part of getting old. Our millennials need a lot more apps to assist them so they can really share in the experience. Here are a few:
• An app to simulate how you feel in the morning when you try to take the first couple of steps away from bed and your legs play a castanet solo and refuse to be legs.
• An app that warns you the last time you saw an attractive member of the female persuasion and sucked in your stomach you keeled over and awoke to find her on the phone with 911 going “some old guy just died.”
• An app that counts the number of teeth you have daily and delivers a mild shock should you ever order steak at a restaurant.
• An app which replaces all your sports smart phone bookmarks with links to Medicare sites.
• An app reminding you that before too long when you hear the term “personal electronic device” you will first think of a toothbrush.
• An app changing everything on your smartphone to 72-point bold type so you can read it.
• An app reminding you what you are outraged about. Nothing bothers us senior citizens more than launching into a tirade against someone, or something, and discovering 90 seconds in we’ve forgotten why we are upset.
• An app to assist you in texting so you don’t put a period between words, turning your message into a link that does absolutely nothing when the textee clicks on it.
• An app that guides you back to your house when you take your morning walk and discover you’ve forgotten where you live.
• An app which automatically dials all your doctors. (They are working on this but have not yet found a way to store all the phone numbers of a senior citizen’s medical personnel in a device that weighs less than 118 pounds.)
• An app that, no matter where you are, automatically finds the shortest difference between your bed and the nearest bathroom in the middle of the night.
• An app that retrieves the TV-DVD-streamingsmartcast-Netflix-Roku, and for all I know, waffle maker, remote when you throw it into the middle of the yard after five minutes of trying to get the local weather on the channel you’ve watched it on for the last 60 years.
That should about do it.
Oh, by the way. I used the photo aging app with the one that’s on this column head and I can’t tell any difference.
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