What are we learning from?

In my house there is a light switch in our downstairs bathroom. If you flip it up, the lights go on. If you flip it down, the lights stay on. This switch has a trick. You have to push the switch slightly to the left and down to make the lights turn off. You might think we should get this fixed. But why? We all know how to turn it off. That switch has taught us all very well. It’s also a lot of fun when friends come over, they go to the rest room and after they’re done, they can’t turn off the lights. I come by, flip the switch a few times and it works fine and I laugh at them. They in turn commit themselves into a crazy house. This could be why I don’t have a lot of friends, but I doubt it. I think my charm and humor are just too much for most people, but I digress.

Our machines teach us

My brother has a car that won’t start unless you take a long stick and tap the starter. It would cost five-hundred-dollars to fix. That’s fifty-six-thousand-seven-hundred-eighty Japanese Yen, or a hundred-fifty-four-thousand-six-hundred-sixty-five Hungarian Forints, and that translates to two-hundred-thirty-seven-thousand-two hundred Armenian Drams! Two-hundred-thirty-seven-thousand anything’s is just too much to pay to get a ten-year-old car fixed. Especially when you know how the easy way to get it started.

Everybody’s got something like this in their life. A remote control you have to hold at a certain angle to power the TV, a toaster you have to stand on cardboard or the switch won’t hold, a radio that you have to tap the back lightly, firmly hit it twice on the side, turn it off then on again, and finally blow into the speaker before it will start to play. Heck, my very own mother keeps a large can of lubricant next to the window in her sun room. Whenever she wants to open that window it’s a long process of yanking up on the window with her left hand and shoving the can in the slot to hold it there with the right. That can is the perfect size. You’re Confused?? Mom says, “What else would you use a can of lubricant for?” Maybe it’s time she went to a place for a nice rest.

The thing I’m trying to say here, is that our things teach us the subtleties of how to operate them every day, and we are very good learners. We’re such great learners, we’d usually rather continue letting the machines teach us than getting things fixed or replaced. The serious problem comes from when we can’t stop learning. An old boss of mine used to get to work at five a.m. and read emails. This is good for a dude at work, but then he went on a great ski vacation in the alps. You guessed it, Switzerland, five a.m. he was checking emails. That’s not vacation. Only a true nudnick would tell pay ten grand to go to Disney World so they could tell Mickey Mouse, “Sorry, no pictures, I’m on a conference call.” And don’t even get me started about Armenian Drams! Okay sure, the backgrounds are good, but don’t you think this is a little excessive?

Our pets teach us

Then there is every person in the world who has a dog. We don’t train dogs, dogs train us. My good friend works from home and has always gotten up at eight. She got a dog. The dog gets up at five and wants to go for a walk. Guess what? My friend is now trained to wake at five every morning, and get dressed so the dog can have a half hour walk. She also used to be very energy conscience, but the dog might get lonely so the TV has to be left on all day when she leaves to see clients. Now she’s never been a great TV watcher so she only had an old, power hungry, twenty-four-inch tube. It was good for the occasional hour but not for three to five days a week So now the dog owns a sixty-inch energy star television with Roku because the local channels don’t come in very well. I wish my cat owned a TV like that! Sadly, she’s more of a tare up the drapes, and rip into flesh for entertainment kind of girl.

But can there be too much learning?

The problem I see is with all this learning we are doing; What happens when our brains get full? Take doctors for instance. Doctors are supposed to know lots of stuff. They go to school for like ten years to learn stuff and then they come against all those machines. What happens now? It might start slow and when they learn that light switch, they only lose ninth grade algebra. But what next? The car, a dog or two and maybe even a, dare I say it, a baby, and this poor doctor could start forgetting important things; how to have a personality for instance.

Especially for important people

This is why all doctors hire a staff. They never want to forget how to charge you for services. How embarrassing would that be? Imagine this ugly scene. A woman is lying in an opulent bedroom and speaks, “Raymond, come to bed. It’s four in the morning.”

The man sitting in the chair across the room responds, “I know my love, but again I have forgotten what to do after I’ve saw Mrs. Finkelstein this afternoon. My brain tells me it’s very important.”

“Darling, must I tell you this every day? You have to bill her.”

“Oh yes! Thanks, my love. I’ll be with you just as soon as I send her a picture of former president Clinton!”

The consequences can be disastrous

The more stuff we acquire the worse the problem gets. Doctors make lots of money and therefore can get a lot more stuff. Suppose, just suppose, you break your funny-bone. You go to Dr. Frank N Stein and he just got a new hamster. He had to learn things about water bottles and cedar chips and cages and poof he now only used to be the greatest funny-bone specialist in the world. You go in with a bandaged arm but walk out with a green face, bolts in your neck, all stiff, three feet taller with a strange fear of fire. When any one asks what happens all you can say is, “NNNNN NNNN RRRRR RRR NNN,” and you can quote me on that.

I guess you could sue for malpractice, but that assumes you can get away from those friendly travel agents, with torches and pitch forks, who want to give you a bird’s-eye view of a local cliff.

But perhaps there is a resonable conclusion

It boggles the mind. I wonder if this might be a political strategy. They fill people’s heads with so much new information, by the time they say, “Vote for The Criminal,” everyone just nods their heads and says, “Sure!” If that’s so maybe it could work for me. I’ve put a whole bunch of facts on this page and I have a message for all the health nuts in spandex out there.

Donuts are Health Food!!

Hey it’s worth a try