Too old for the tooth fairy…
My latest encounter with strange technology occurred with some recent trips to the dentist. Like a lot of people I have trouble with my wisdom teeth. I don’t get tooth aches just the odd infection, gross, I know, but my dentist was so indecisive he decided he’d refer me to another dentist. So one year later and then dentist number two decides that my wisdom teeth have to come out. Tooth number one came out last Friday.
Now, I’m not bragging or anything but I can handle pain, I have a pretty high pain threshold. Local anaesthetic they said. No problem I said. Giant needle, bring it on. Now, you’re probably wondering when I’m going to shut up about what a brave little soldier I am and get to the technology part. Basically without technology and fancy gadgets, I reckon I’d still have my teeth.
The first thing that I had done when I went in for my first consult was to have an x-ray of my mouth. I’ve had x-rays done before but never with a machine like this. I had to step up to a frame, put my chin on a little chin rest while a camera rotated around my head. When I was eventually seen by the dentist later that day he showed me the x-ray and I could see my lovely teeth, complete with all their lovely fillings.
In true Carrie Bradshaw style, I began to wonder, would the dentist have taken the tooth out without having looked at the x-ray? Was it actually necessary for me to get to use this wonderful piece of technology, or were they just giving me something to do in the middle of the 5 hours that I was waiting to see the dentist. Were they using technology to distract me? I tried to think of other instances where technology has been used to keep me distracted.
I thought of all those times when I watched movies in class. In some cases, like my films studies course, I think it was necessary for me to watch them. But there was one time for a 9 am lecture where a lecturer just stuck on a DVD of The Simpsons. It was the one where Homer gets to work for a technology corporation, supposed to be either Apple or Microsoft. At the end of the episode, the lecturer, who had left the room, waltzes back in and goes “ well I think that was all self explanatory and you can see the relevance to your course material there”. I left the lecture hall with my confused face that day, because the relevance, from where I was sitting, wasn’t as clear cut as was made out. I sort of think that there was either no lesson plan or someone just didn’t want to engage with the class that morning. At 9 O’ clock on a Monday morning, who could blame them?
And as if spending a lecture watching The Simpsons didn’t bring my academic career into disrepute enough, I’ve actually had lecturers advocate the use of YouTube as a research tool and Wikipedia as a valid referencing tool. I would not be lying to tell you that wikiedia.org actually appeared on a reading list for a certain course. In fairness it was a bit of a joke of a course, the lecturer was like a bad babysitter, all he ever did was put on documentaries during class time. How I ever got a degree I’ll never know.
But now I feel guilty. For all the time that I have spent resenting technology and the speed at which it has advanced to a point way beyond my comprehension level, people have been abusing it in order to pacify me and keep me entertained. Well, not always entertained, the tooth pulling wasn’t the most entertaining experience of my life. But I must say, and this may be the medication talking, that I have found a new found respect for technology. It has been doing so much for me, and I never really let it know how much I appreciated it, until now. So I’d like to say thank you to the pieces of technology that have helped make life easier for me over the years. And I suppose, by default to the people that came up with the ideas, kudos to one and all.
