NANAIMO, BC — Local Gen X-er Jerry Greene flailed like an inflatable car dealership mascot today as he attempted to untangle and insert his AirPods before answering his ringing iPhone.
“‘Call missed.’ Dammit, this happens every time,” Greene said. “It wasn’t even a number I recognized. Why did I try to answer it? I can’t help it. When I grew up, the phone ringing was a siren song, demanding you drop everything and pick it up right this second. And I still haven’t got these fucking ear buds untangled!”
“This is all too common with Gen-Xers,” said tech vlogger Christie Lang. “Their formative years involved such sophisticated gadgets as the Walkman, the Etch-a-Sketch and those red ‘Merlin’ things that let you play electronic tic-tac-toe. It’s actually surprising any of those geezers can send an email, much less remove wireless earphones from their holder and stick ‘em in their ears. But at least they get to brag they were into the Pixies before you.”
“These AirPods, just like smartphones, were supposed to make my life easier,” Greene said, “And now we’re all addicted to these things that aren’t anywhere near as fun as the coke, dancing, and sex we were addicted to in the 80s.”
“Seriously, why can’t we go back to having landlines with those long coiled cords,” Greene continued, shifting to compensate for the pain in his lower back that mysteriously began when he hit his mid-forties. “Sure, they’d get knotted up all to shit, and you’d have to dangle the phone upside-down and let it spin around for two minutes to undo itself, but that actually passed for fun back then. It helped soothe the low-level of trauma of having been neglected since birth.”
At press time, Greene’s attempt to de-stress by looking at classic cars on Pinterest was stymied when he mangled his MacBook Air by trying to jam an ethernet cable into its USB-C port.
