Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Improvements in technology

276 words

For calling my parents in South Africa, I have several decades of technological progress at my disposal.

I can use my computer for that. For example with iChat if I want it to be pretty and with a high likelihood of things not working. Or I can use Skype which is a bit uglier but works better. But at least that’s free. If you don’t count in the costs of being online, that is, and the thousands of Euros various family members had to spend on MacBooks and Powerbooks to be able to use that software.

Alternatively, I can use my landline to call my parents on their mobile. This doesn’t require both parties to be online and my parents don’t have to be at home. Sound quality can be rather shoddy, depending on both the phone provider I use and the place my parents are at. You can also have dropped connections this way if my parents move around too much during the call. All that technological fancy comes at a cost of just over €0,10 per minute.

Or I can use my good old fashioned analogue phone to call my parents on their good old fashioned analogue phone line – now that they managed to get one. It requires them to be at home, but it is the most relaxing of the experiences as you can easily have a connection with a decent sound quality and no delays this way. And that’s at just over €0,03 per minute.

As much as I love all the fancy high tech stuff, it just doesn’t work as well as a traditional phone connection. Call me a technophobe.

January 22, 2008, 0:15

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