Apr 26, 2023 3 min read

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day when I noticed she suddenly looked at her watch. Her gaze lingered rather long as she was seemingly fixated on the time. One of my coworkers did the same thing recently and then started laughing. When two more of our friends repeated the same behavior, I realized something strange was happening. I wondered whether they were all running late for an appointment or were they that bored talking with me that they thought time was dragging on endlessly. While that is entirely possible, given how much I love to talk, the answer turned out to be technology. You see, they were all looking at text messages on their Apple watches.

I know, I know, they’re awesome. I remember reading the Dick Tracy comic strip in the newspaper as a kid and thinking his super cool two-way radio wristwatch (first dreamed up by the writers in the 1940s) would be the most amazing invention ever. Fast forward to the late 1980s and my first job out of college when I had to drive 40 minutes in the dark along back roads to get home each night. My mom insisted I get a car phone. That’s right, a CAR phone. Remember those? I thought they were the Dick Tracy radio watch of their time, surpassed only by the portable bag cellular phone. I had to drive somewhere over by Century III Mall to get an installer to weave the car phone wires under the floorboards and attached a tiny microphone to the sunshade. My next favorite tech possession was the flip phone, followed by a cellphone where the top layer slid back to reveal a keyboard for texting.

Don’t even get me started on the transition from eight-track tapes to boom boxes, cassettes to CDs, MP3s to streaming. I still have stacks of CDs with no way to play them except in my husband’s car. My favorite ’80s artists’ cassettes still play on a vintage boom box stashed in the coat closet, and I cling to an antique VCR to occasionally view old vacation videos.

I used to have a FitBit fitness tracker, which was fun for counting steps but didn’t last long. Now, my smartphone counts steps for me and I have a different brand smart watch/fitness tracker that can pair with my phone if I want. I hooked it up at first and was able to read texts when my wrist buzzed. The problem is that only works if I’m also carrying the phone, so what’s the point? Why not just look at my phone when it buzzes?

That leads me back to the Apple watch and folks staring at it in mid-conversation. Would Miss Manners think that is just as impolite as pulling out your phone mid-conversation to read a text? Hold that thought: I just felt my wrist buzz!

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.