ON DEMAND
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
(This quote has nothing to do with my post today. It has to do with EVERYTHING. Dear Maya Angelou, your strong, beautiful voice cannot be replaced or silenced.)
Over a recent dinner, my uncle through marriage, age 86, recommended a documentary he’d seen on television. “You can get it on demand,” he said.
Jonathan and I nodded. We said we would watch it. We won’t. We don’t know how to do ‘on demand.’*
I used to be the only one at home who didn’t do ‘on demand.’ Now my technically savvy husband, whose volunteer work includes: teaching computer/internet classes to seniors and whose homework and marriage vows include: operating/holding our remote, helping me get my columns and blog online so my readers and editors won’t see I’m a moron, and rescuing me when things somehow get deleted and I start freaking out, has sufficiently dumbed down.
We discovered this while babysitting. On their way out one evening after the baby was asleep, my daughter and son-in-law suggested some shows we might want to watch ‘on demand.’ For a while J tried to get it. I did other things. Things like: stare at the baby monitor, ask J. how he’s doing, eat, read, go to the toilet, ask J again how he’s doing, stare at the baby monitor some more, eat some more, get out Scrabble and play it with J, who gave up with ‘on demand,’ and towards the end of the evening turn on the television and watch something on cable or a network so the TV would be on when our little charge’s parents walked in.
We didn’t tell them we couldn’t figure out ‘on demand.’ We want to be hired again.
Now we simply nod when those in their 30s through their 80s tell us to watch things ‘on demand.’ If and when it finds its way onto our ‘Must Do’ list, I trust someone in my marriage will figure it out.
*Dear Inez, (my first friend whom I’ve known since the first day of first grade and who comments regularly here. I have a hunch you can relate.
