Hardware envy

This Thanksgiving, as everyone was whipping out their cameras to take pictures of the kids, my father looked at my camera and said, "My God! That thing is huge!"

Well, he's right. It's a six-year-old Sony Cybershot, and it's about the six of a box of animal crackers. But what makes it more interesting is that this same camera elicited whistles of appreciation from the same man five years ago.

There's nothing new about hardware getting old . . . or men talking about their computers or gadgets they way they used to talk about their cars. But it's not just the hardware that's changing -- the people who are using it is changing just as fast. A seventy-year-old man is dissing my camera. Before you know it, some homeless man is going to laugh at my Cybershot and ask if I looted a Salvation Army depot to get it. And I'm going to sound like the crufty old geezer still typing his letters with WordStar on a PC Junior -- "Well, it works fine for me, I don't really need anything newer . . . "

This may be my first keeping-up-with-the-Jones moment . . . where I stopped to wonder whether I should buy something new, not because I wanted it, or needed it, but because I wondered what people would think of me because of it.

Nah.