“Well, hello! It’s been a long time – how are you doing?” a man says upon meeting an old friend in the street.
The friend shows him a bag containing a computer, and says: “I’m fine, thank you! I’ve just bought a new computer for my son. It’s his birthday tomorrow.”
“Just think – kids using all that advanced equipment today. It was sure different in the old days. Our teachers never allowed us to use any kind of learning aids.”
The man with the bag thinks a bit about this, and says: “We didn’t even have electric lights in our school, and furthermore, we had to write everything by hand.”
“In my school I only used a ballpoint pen when writing,” says the first man, “and if I made tiniest mistake, I had to start all over again.”
                   “Life was not exactly a piece of cake in those days. When writing we were only allowed a feather and we all had to share a little bottle of ink. One misplaced comma and we would be expelled from school immediately.”
                   “Well … I know I said we used a ballpoint pen, but in reality it was just a stick with ink, but to us it was a technical wonder.”
                   “Was it a wooden stick?”
                   “Yes.”
                   “You lucky bastard! In my school we had no luxuries what so ever! On exams my teacher would beat me with a broken bottle and after that I had to scratch an essay about my unlimited admiration for him on a wooden plate with my fingernails. If I made any mistakes …”
                   “Then what?”
                   “Then he would cut off my fingernails and force me to scratch the whole thing into a flagstone in the school yard.”
                   “Obviously you were spoiled,” the first one concludes, “For my exams I had my mouth filled with ink before having to write highly advanced scientific reports with my tongue on the bathroom floor - backwards. Our teacher would constantly be thrashing us with a baseball bat while working and if we made just a tiniest little mistake we were hung by our eyelashes and forced to blink an apology in Morse code.”
                   “That’s right, and if you tell this to young people today, they don’t even believe you.”
The two men fell quiet while studying the computer in the bag for a while.
“Do you know how to use that computer?” the first man finally asks.
“No … It’s not as easy as it looks. Actually, my son spends a lot of time learning how to operate computers. He’s had to learn countless abbreviations, symbols, functions and commands just to write a simple essay.”
                   “I think my son is worse off than yours,” the first replies. “He has to use a computer in school every single day and if there is a power break, he’s unable to work. And as if this wasn’t enough – every few months we have to buy a new computer that he has to figure out how to use.”
                   “Your son has nothing to complain about,” the second man says. ”In school they force my son to install new programs in his computer every day. He has to be able to make back-up copies, guard himself against viruses, allow for an abundance of technical problems and make the computer record and play back sound and video. If they find out there’s something he doesn’t know, he’s immediately expelled from school.”
                   “Right! Then I better tell you the real story about my son. My son is forced to read oceans of texts - full of inaccuracies - on the net every single day. The teachers heap piles of thick incomprehensible manuals on him and he can no longer think for himself when his computer is off. The other day he had to withdraw money from his bank and the clerk paid him in seashells. Naturally he didn’t notice the problem.”
“Why not?”
“Because the battery in his laptop was dead.”
                   “As if that was something! Without his computer my son’s so moronic he can’t even recognize his mother or me; he can’t write by hand or do arithmetic in his head. At home we primarily use him as a bookend if his computer isn’t working. He just sits up there and stares stupidly at the blank screen.”
                   “Yes, yes – but no doubt my son is considerably more brainless than yours. He can neither write by hand nor on his computer. He finds all his reports on the net or he copies them from the other students. The only words he knows are one-letter ones or, on a good day, a few words that help him operate simple computer games.”
                   “Computer games?!”
                   “Yes.”
                   “If this is true your son is a rocket scientist compared to mine! My son can’t even figure out how to play a computer game. As soon as the computer’s off he’s as helpless as a jellyfish in a running blender. The only thing he can do is to beat his head against the keyboard while his friends stand behind him, astonished by his exceptional ability to use the latest computer technology.”
“Yes, one can say many things about computers, but life was much better in the good old days …”