Out of Touch

What do these two items have in common?

1) Greyness;
2) They're both in my home; and
3) The concept of being able to make effective use of either device is as foreign to me as Guatemala.

In psych class in college I read about the concept of cognitive unavailability, which is when something is so far removed from the collective radar of a culture that the people of the culture can't even understand the idea of the thing. After more than five years at 187A, that is what the idea of using a thermostat to somewhat precisely control an area's temperature is to me.

Heat in my last apartment was extraordinarily hard to come by. All winter, the radiators would sputter and clang to life only for a little while most mornings and rarely throughout the rest of the day, on the whole providing far more noise than heat.

So for the first few weeks in the new place, it's taken a long time for it to register in my head that there is a small dial in my home that I can move a quarter inch to the right and have my apartment start getting warm a couple minutes later. After almost a month, I shake my head and marvel a little bit each time I hear the boiler start rumbling below my feet a second after I dial up the heat.

The way I feel about that thermostat is the exact opposite of taking something for granted.

This all reminds me...I'm going to go turn on the heat.

The DVR is a a slightly different story. Out of my 30 years, I've only had the DVR for nine months. It hasn't been enough time for me to get into the habit of using it, so it still doesn't often occur to me to record anything. The Giants Super Bowl win that I should be watching about twice each month? Not on my DVR. When I do think to use it to record sports, I rarely get my whole game, which almost caused my head to explode when I was watching the Kansas-Davidson game and my screen went black with three minutes left and the score tied and me in the lead in my work pool with the Jayhawks as my champion. My failure to assimilate DVR into my life and easily absorb this technology makes me feel old.

I said it was a slightly different story, not a slightly interesting one.

By the way, I won the pool.