Many of us have this nostalgia for the old days; we think we want to return to the good ole’ times.

But those days were not always so great. Life was tough in the old days — far tougher than we, who live in the 21st century, can imagine. I don’t really want to return to the days without electricity and running water, because I am a product of the modern centuries, and I need that air conditioning and daily hot shower.

But I do like to reminisce. Remember when the phone was connected to the wall? I liked this time because then I did not have to spend several hours a day trying to discover the last location of the phone. It was right there on the wall where it had been attached the entire time. And because now it’s so easy to silence the phone, even when I am searching for it, I cannot locate it because the phone is not making any noise to help with the discovery.

Another nostalgic thing: the old-fashioned television that had knobs, knobs which required the person to move from the seat to the television to change one of the four channels that the television offered. The viewer just walked up to the box, turned the button, and watched the program that appeared.

Hey, there is nothing memorable about having only four channels — four that could be viewed all at the same time if the wind was blowing the antenna in the right direction, and I’ve no desire to return to the time of rushing to watch a program at a specific time because I like the fact that now I need not worry about what time I watch television.

Honestly, I have no idea what time programs air. I watch the 7 p.m. news at 10:30 p.m., sometimes even a day late. And the reason the news is a day late — I can’t find the remote to turn on the television.

This brings me to the issue of the remote. I am not sure who came up with the idea of having a television remote (especially a tiny keypad that has miniscule numbers that people who are…more mature…cannot see) instead of attached knobs. Besides that, when designing this moveable object, that person should have thought about all the places the remote could be left, a disappearance that prevents the audience from viewing the television program.

Now, to add pain to misery, we have a SmartTV. To operate this monster requires a technology degree and a familiarity with a vocabulary that most mature people can’t quite decipher. After a SmartTV lesson with my son, I am left wondering if the SmartTV is designed to keep people from watching or to keep people from finding what they want to watch.

Maybe there is a bit of nostalgia. Those old days may not have been great, but then I knew the phone was on the wall, and I knew how to access the evening news.

Toms Brook Mayor Lisa Currie, a former journalist, is an adjunct English professor at Shenandoah University and Lord Fairfax Community College. When she’s not writing her weekly columns, she is working diligently revising her first collection of short stories.

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