Overdue Glass Narrative

It certainly has been awhile hasn’t it?  Well I’m here to get myself back on track and give you guys and gals updates about my time with Google Glass.  If this is your first time knowing of me, then welcome!  I’m trying to put as much of an authentic and humanistic spin on technology.  I promise that this will not be extremely long like my first post was, even if most of you from Reddit did in fact read that ~3,300 word monstrosity in its entirety.  I’ll talk about what has happened over the last month or so and then from now on I will post shorter, more frequent narratives.  Alrighty then let’s get to it!

So I wear Glass everywhere.  Yes I mean I wear it absolutely everywhere.  Out to the store, to class, sports bars for wing night, you name it.  The only times I take it off are when I’m driving or when going into a public restroom for obvious reasons.  Like in my last post, a lot of people will come up to talk to you about them especially if you have them strapped on 24/7.  It’s a guaranteed occurrence and I have gotten so used to it that I think nothing of it.  However, in my first Glass narrative I talked about mostly the younger demographic wanting to chat me up about the red piece of plastic strapped to my forehead.  One thing that I have learned over the last month is that people know about it.  It doesn’t matter if they are 21-year-old tech enthusiasts or 63-year-old grandmothers out getting coffee at Starbucks, people know about Google Glass.  It is kind of amazing really since there is absolutely zero advertisements.  The next few examples really opened up my view of the world and made me realize that I need to give humanity the benefit of the doubt more often when it comes to all things technology.

My first eye-opener was in a small-town countryville, USA WalMart.  Yup, that type of WalMart.  It was about a week before Christmas and there was an influx in the amount of people than usual.  I volunteered to go with my mother and grandmother to help out with being a human pack mule like all college-aged boys have the privilege of doing.  Ok yes I did want to spend time with them and I also really wanted to get out and use Google Glass (more on that later).  So we are browsing through the action figure aisle when an elderly couple happen to see me wearing Google Glass.  The grandfather asked if I was wearing the Google Goggles that he kept hearing about in the news.  I told him that I in fact was wearing them.  I felt no need to correct him because I knew that he was aware of what they were and it might have been snobby to correct him.  It was a very brief conversation about how they worked and he wanted to know if they were currently out yet.  I informed him about the testing program that I was lucky enough to be apart of.  His wife came over and started to talk about how her grandchildren are going to think nothing of this in 10 or so years.  Bit of a depressing realization, yes, but inspiring to think about how far we will have come in those 10 years.  At the end of the conversation I said something to the effect of “Yeah you are going to have a whole bunch of George Jetsons running around your house”.  She laughed and said, “That is something my husband would have said!  That was his favorite cartoon!”  We then went on our separate ways.

My second and third eye-openers were back in my college town at good ole Wegman’s Grocery.  I apologize if I seem to be bragging that not only do I have Google Glass, but I also have a Wegman’s right in my backyard.  So I go to the bakery to pick up a pizza that I had ordered.  I stand in line waiting behind, yet again, a couple who were probably in their 60’s to 70’s.  This time the woman broke the ice and asked me why I was missing the lenses and lower frames on my glasses.  “Surely this isn’t the newest and stupidest fashion trend is it?”  She had caught me off-guard.  The first thing that ran through my mind was what a lot of Redditors have said in the past: you get scowled upon by older generations as if you are doing something bad.  I tried to recollect my thoughts and say in a courteous way that these were actually a new piece of technology.  Mind you, this awkward exchange happened in front of about 15 strangers and 5 employees.  Before I could react, she and her husband started laughing and the woman informed me that she knew they were those “fancy” new things being made by Google.  Like usual I gave them my cut-down speech of how they worked and answered any questions that they had.  They were very happy to talk to me about them and were interested if Glass would be coming out with prescription lenses because they actually wanted a pair.  The woman had said that she would love to use the recipe app assuming that she could see it.  The man said that he would take it golfing all the time.  Now I had said nothing of these features or apps that Glass has the potential to do.  They were clearly informed on Glass even if it was them checking out the Glass Start page online.  Good for them.

Finally, on my third experience I met another older gentleman in Wegmans on a completely different day.  He met me in the cereal aisle as I was grabbing for my box of Life.  He started asking me some general questions then got into some really good ones.  Reason being?  He was a civil engineer.  He asked about everything from the beta testing program, to what programming language do you have to know for it, to what I wanted to do for a living.  He really really wanted to get the straight facts and know all the finer details about the whole situation.  I usually don’t ask people if they want to try them on, but I offered and he obliged.

TL;DR

So what was the purpose of this update?  I guess it was just to say that you should never judge a book by its cover.  All too often have I read about how the older generation “just doesn’t understand the now” or “are preventing the advancement of science and technology”.  Well I think that mindset is counterproductive and doesn’t help your own cause (if you feel that way).  Maybe I have just been lucky in my anecdotal experiences with the people that I have met.  Who knows.  What I do know now though, is that there are a lot of people out there who are more informed about the progression of technology than I thought.  That we “geeks” aren’t the only ones in-the-know.  I think that is a great thing.  Here’s to hoping all age groups jump on the Google Glass bandwagon!