I Have Seen The Future

I have seen the future.....and I need to do my hair.

Growing up, I read lots of science fiction and comic books. The Future was right around the next bend. The Future always involved planetary travel and mysterious food bots that could whip up any delicacy you wanted out of loose atoms.

In the real world, I've lived through the transition of crank-and-wind to power windows on my car, Internet that started with a distinctive wheeeeeee-boing-ke-boing-boing tone and ended eventually with effortless connection, and the invention of online banking. And yes, there is also my beloved iphone. If I really stop and think about it I end up feeling old because of the sheer amount of technological sophistication that I have come to accept as completely normal. (sorry, mom and dad, because by extension I am calling you super-old. You are not that! You are Super-Experienced!)

One item in all of the sci fi books was the video phone. And tonight I experienced that for the first time in my own non-fiction world. Yeah, yeah, I've had a webcam before but I've never had a casual long distance phone conversation that just happened to include a video feed. I must give the credit for this to my parents. They have been using skype and a webcam to talk to my sister for a while now, and they finally dragged me out of the dark ages and into The Now.

It was all very different. Usually when I'm on the phone I'm walking around the house (see, I changed from wired to cordless phones within my lifetime too!) doing stuff. Tonight, I had to think about it. I had the phone call with mom and dad. Before that, I had to prep my dinner (a chicken), start the grill, get the temperature regulated, put the chicken on, and hope that it would just cook away while I was talking. On a regular phone call I would have multi-tasked and not thought about it at all. And as I was sitting down and the computer, I actually thought "is my visible house behind the camera clean enough? Do I look like a crazy person? Should I brush my hair?" These are things that never occur to me on the phone.

And then suddenly dad was talking me through it and there they were. Both crammed into the view-line of a laptop webcam. They were in my old bedroom, actually, and turned the laptop around so that I could see where they were.

I was in the future. We talked for a good half hour with minimal lag. Mom asked what craft I was working on, and I held it up in front of the camera for her to see. It was mind blowing.

Hello, future. I am finally here, thanks to my age-defying parents.