Mark Zuckerberg would be busing tables at Olive Garden if he relied on people like me to make him rich.
I own an iPhone 6c and an iPad. I use my phone — a powerful hand-held computer that would have blown the socks off Albert Einstein — as a phone first, then for text messages, as a camera, to surf the Web maybe four times a month on the outside and use it as an alarm clock when I’m on vacation. I have never downloaded music. I’ve only downloaded one app from the Apple Store that I’ve kept — Pages.
Basically tech for the sake of tech is completely wasted on me.
It goes without saying I won’t be in the market for the supposedly latest and greatest Samsung refrigerator.
It’s the one with the three built-in cameras that — when used in conjunction with an app on your smartphone — allows you to see inside your refrigerator anywhere providing you have cell service.
This begs the obvious question: Why do you want a photo feed from inside of your refrigerator?
Samsung’s TV commercials hint that you might be at the grocery store and wonder if you need eggs. All you have to do is whip out your smartphone click on the app and browse through the fridge.
The type of person that would have an app on their smartphone so they could monitor the mold growth in real time on the cheese ball leftover from Christmas 2012 probably hasn’t been to a grocery store since the last Bush Administration. After all, if God had intended us to shop at grocery stores He never would have created Amazon.com.
Remember the good old days when refrigerators were simply a place that you stored perishables so they wouldn’t spoil?
We’ve come a long ways since my grandmother’s ice box where the compartment storing the food was about a quarter of the size of the apparatus used to keep it cool.
Granted ice makers, cold water dispensers and even interchangeable compartments that can go from refrigerator to freezer and back depending upon your need are nice but there is a point at which you overshoot the runway.
Samsung will sell you the RF28K9580SR 28.0 cubic foot stainless steel French door refrigerator for a mere $4,794.80. Of course that comes with a Family Hub “with a WiFi enabled touchscreen that lets you manage your groceries, connect with your family, and entertain like never before.”
So why do I need a refrigerator that takes a picture every time the door is closed? I’m not storing gold at Fort Knox. It’s food from Food-4-Less and Target. Why do I need a digital calendar the size of an extra-large pizza when the screen on the refrigerator door is in calendar mode? Besides if I’m so tech crazy I probably have all of my family’s smartphone calendars synched.
And I certainly don’t need Pandora to stream music from by refrigerator door.
As for using my refrigerator door to make a grocery list and send it by an app to my favorite grocery store using Groceries by Mastercard and then presumably having them delivered by drone, I doubt I’d have any money left to buy groceries after paying $4,794.80 for a refrigerator.
I guess the bottom line is this: Why do I have to stay connected when I go to the fridge to grab a yogurt? What’s next? High efficiency toilets with Internet connectivity?
Outside of the fact I refuse to pay more for a kitchen appliance with a limited two-year warranty than my father paid for his first house back in 1952, I really don’t get why everyone has to be connected 24/7 and why refrigerators can’t just be refrigerators.
It’s ironic in a day and age where we are in constant communication with each other and can get in touch with almost anyone on the planet at a tap or two of our fingers that we fail most of the time to listen to people.
I don’t need Siri to give me advice nor do I see the need to provide real time streaming for the world to see me clipping my toenails. Besides the fact the state of my toes would gross out most people I don’t buy into the philosophy that the world evolves around me.
I am not too sure what creeps me out the most: The fact that someone is so vain that they think anyone would want to watch someone clipping their toenails or the fact that someone out there would find that interesting or would have the time to kill to watch it.
How we use the Internet must be a major disappointment to the early tech pioneers that made it possible. They had wild dreams about it bringing the world together through better understanding and making life more productive and meaningful.
One wonders what they think of the explosion of social media postings that have made the “Me Generation” a perpetual concept and the blog rantings that have marginalized serious social discourse.
We no longer ponder what came first, the egg or the chicken. Now we check our apps to see if we have eggs or chicken in the fridge.

This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.