Oh, lovely. I have to get some kind of post in before Blogger's scheduled outage at 10 PM my time.

My grandparents may well have a point concerning technological advances. Not that they've ever come out and said anything in particular about it, but they have always lived their lives in such a way that they just don't care about those advances.

They have certainly been dragged, kicking and screaming, into encounters with technology that are usually orchestrated by my dad the technophile. Their Betamax was replaced by a VHS through my father's instigation. My dad conspired with my aunt's ex once to get my grandparents a new TV because my dad was sick of having to adjust the horizontal hold on the old TV every time he visited. Dad got my grandparents onto the Internet by giving them a computer that he had deemed obsolete for his purposes, but he and my brother both made sure that the machine was set up for my grandparents to send and receive email, at least.

The only time my grandparents will get on the computer to do anything related to email, however, is at night, just before they go to bed. They still have a dial-up connection, and they are afraid of missing any calls during the day. My grandmother chided me for getting online in mid-morning on her computer recently, because no one would be able to get through the phone line. I talked with her about getting a second phone line so that she could receive her calls, and then I remembered my good buddy DSL. She latched on to the idea, and we called AT&T to see what kind of plans they offered...

...only to have our initial attempt at researching the service thwarted by that disgusting technological innovation, the super-detailed voice mail system. A labyrinth of such four-dimensional proportions and Pavlovian button-pushing complexity that it makes mere mortals scream in frustration and behave like the apes in 2001:A Space Odyssey when they come in contact with the monolith. We never actually did get to speak with a flesh and blood humanoid in our individual attempts to bypass all the numerical options the AT&T system gleefully and sadistically provided us, but I did learn that AT&T WorldCom doesn't offer DSL in my grandparents' neck of the woods.

Dan asked my grandma what she thought of Optimum Online. "It's associated with Cablevision, which we are already giving loads of money to for our cable TV," she said.

So it's looking like Verizon, once my grandparents switch over their long distance service, too.

My grandparents' general attitude towards the switch, however, is that it will happen when it happens. There's no rush. And I'm finding, more and more, that there's a great deal of truth to that attitude in a number of ways.

So yeah, there will be an outage. So I can't post on a fellow Blogger's blog unless he/she is on Blogger beta. So I can't control the turning of the world with the touch of a button. Something must be wrong if it's not being done right this second, right?

Wrong.

Instead of fretting over the impending outage, I will finish this post shortly and leave that behind in the past. My blog, overall, will live to see another day. And if it don't? C'est la vie.