In addition to owning a couple great
ranches, Thomas Watson Jr. was also the son of the founder of IBM. After
his father died, Thomas Watson Jr. ran IBM as President and CEO and he
did a much better job at that occupation than he ever would have as a
fortune teller. For example, he predicted that there would only ever be a
world market for five computers!
I think it’s safe to say that your average teenager in America has more than that!
This
year we went to a conspicuous consumption Christmas at a friends’s
house and got to watch their family unwrap box after box of computer
driven equipment, as if they didn’t already have enough. To give you
some idea how big their house is, the alpha male of the family drove a
Segway® to the unwrapping ceremony and HE WAS IN THE SAME HOUSE as the
gifts! By the time he arrived his son was already in someplace called
Virtual Reality and was wearing something called an Oculus®, which
looked like a giant pair of sunglasses and allowed him to play expensive
video games. He could be anything he wanted to be, a hero in outer
space or a gun-wielding warrior. I was amazed by the device because it
allowed whoever wore it to start knocking over knick knacks while
grabbing at things in midair as if he was a ring man catching bids at a
bull sale.
The
grandkids thought it would be a real hoot to put Grandma in the pilot’s
seat of a plane flying through the Grand Canyon. This, despite the fact
that the closest Grandma had ever come to a cockpit was in aisle three
on an Alaskan Airlines flight from Denver to Seattle! As Grandma did the
smart thing and baled out, she kept yelling something about a
parachute, of which there was the same number of working toilets in
Virtual Realityville: none.
Those who
weren’t stuck in Virtual Reality were lost in “real time” where they got
into a big argument over who inherited Grandma’s FitBit®, a gift she’d
unwrapped prior to her takeoff earlier in the day. As far as I could
tell, FitBit® is a wearable computer that counts the number of steps it
takes to the refrigerator and back.
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