Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) (10 page)

I do not relate this anecdote to let you know that I had a funny personal moment with Johnny Carson and you did not.
*
I relate this anecdote because Johnny Carson was making an important point, which is that the entire massive do-it-yourself industry is built on a LIE; namely, that you can in fact do it yourself.

The worst offender is Home Depot. This is the giant store chain that runs TV commercials in which eager, attractive young couples, assisted by helpful smiling Home Depot employees, look excitedly at tile samples or pieces of wood and then—approximately eight seconds later, after a brief scene in which they are wielding paintbrushes or drilling a hole while wearing safety glasses—they're standing happily in
a brand-new modern kitchen that they did entirely themselves
.

Really, Home Depot? That has not been my experience with your store. I do not see attractive couples there, eager to tackle major projects. I see beaten-down people whose houses are broken, glumly pushing huge orange carts down endless aisles and standing in utter bafflement in front of vast, daunting displays of house parts they do not understand, wondering whether they should get the five-and-three-eighths one with the ribbed flange, or the seven-and-nine-sixteenths one with the reverse coupling, or maybe the thirty-seven-millimeter one (whatever a “millimeter” is) or maybe just grab the one that says AS SEEN ON TV, knowing in their hearts that whatever one they pick, it probably won't work, and even it does, it will eventually break, because it is part of a house.

You know how drug commercials on TV are required to have disclaimers, so that after they tell you how great the drug is, they tell you it can have negative side effects such as death? I think they should require disclaimers like that on Home Depot commercials. At the end, when they're showing the happy couple in their new do-it-yourself kitchen, an announcer would say: “These people are actors. They are not capable of operating an espresso machine, let alone building this kitchen. This was done by contractors with trucks.”

Or maybe just: “Home Depot. You can't do shit yourself.”

I'd like to see somebody open a chain of stores called “Reality Hardware.” When homeowners wanted to tackle a home-improvement project, they'd go to Reality Hardware and discuss it with a knowledgeable employee, who would talk them through it.

HOMEOWNER:
I want to install a ceiling fan.

EMPLOYEE:
Really?

HOMEOWNER:
Yes.

EMPLOYEE:
You want to install a machine with long, sharp blades whirling at high speeds directly over the heads of live human beings?

HOMEOWNER:
Well, yes.

EMPLOYEE:
I see. And do you have any particular expertise in this area? Any training in the field of ceiling fan installation?

HOMEOWNER:
Um, no, not in ceiling fan installation per se.

EMPLOYEE:
In what, then?

HOMEOWNER:
I'm a dentist.

EMPLOYEE:
I see. And would you be comfortable having a professional ceiling fan installer give you a root canal?

HOMEOWNER:
Well, no. But that's a diff—

EMPLOYEE:
I'd like you to take a look at this photograph of a recent “do-it-yourself” ceiling fan installation.

HOMEOWNER:
My God. Is that—

EMPLOYEE:
Yes. His hand. It landed eight feet away.

HOMEOWNER:
I think I'll hire a professional.

EMPLOYEE:
Yes. With a truck.

HOMEOWNER:
Well, can I at least buy the fan here?

EMPLOYEE:
We don't sell fans at Reality Hardware. We don't sell any house parts. Or tools.

HOMEOWNER:
Well, what do you sell?

EMPLOYEE:
Tupperware.

* * *

I Have Seen the Future, but I Had Trouble Reading It

* * *

Before you read this review of Google Glass, I want to stress that I am totally “down” with modern technology. I am not some clueless old fart shouting “HELLO! HELLO!” into a mobile phone he is holding upside down.
*

I
love
new technology. I am what is known as an “early adopter.” Over the decades I have spent tens of thousands of dollars adopting new technology that I used for periods of time ranging from one week to as long as three weeks, at which time it ceased to be as new as it once was, leaving me with no choice but to buy a newer one. I have boxes and boxes filled with old new technology, and still more boxes containing dense, tangled snarls of cables and power adapters that I would need if I wanted to make the technology work again, which of course I never would because it is old.

I have been buying GPS units since the days when they had tiny black-and-white screens that said only: YOU ARE PROBABLY IN EITHER NORTH OR SOUTH AMERICA. I have owned “mobile” phones the size of LeBron James. I early-adopted every single version of the Windows operating system, including “Vista,” which summoned hell demons who possessed your computer and played pranks such as changing all your verbs to adjectives, and I
continued
early-adopting Windows versions after that. If Windows came out with a version called “Windows Stab You in the Eyeball with a Fork,” I would adopt it.

I currently own seven electric guitars. Seven! Not because I am a good guitar player; I am a bad guitar player. I have seven electric guitars because they are
electric
. I am a huge fan of anything that uses electricity. I have one guitar that, using electricity, tunes itself. You press a button and it makes a noise like
WAAAHOOOOM
, and somehow it is in tune. This is something I have not been able to make a guitar do in over fifty years of turning the little pegs by myself. Tragically, I still have to physically
play
the guitar, so it sounds less like a musical instrument than a device that a sheep rancher would use to repel predators. I hope that someday there will be a newer model of this guitar (which I will buy) that tunes itself and then
plays
itself, so I won't even have to be in the room.

Like many men of the male gender, I believe I have a natural intuitive grasp of how technology works. I am the “tech support” person in my household. Whenever my wife or daughter informs me that some electronic device is not working properly, I utilize my superior knowledge by (a) turning the device off, thereby allowing the bad electricity to drain out of it, then (b) turning the device back on, thereby causing fresh new electricity to flow in and heal it. If this fails to fix the problem, I buy a new one. This always works.

The point is, I consider myself to be pro-technology and knowledgeable about gadgets. So when I heard about Google Glass, I wanted it. I wasn't sure exactly what it did, but I knew it was new, and it apparently involved electricity. It also involved Google, of which I am a huge fan. Google has basically replaced my brain. There was a time when, if somebody asked me a question—say, “Who is Socrates?”—I had to manually think about it. Whereas now I just Google it and, boom, I have the answer. (“An ancient dead person.”) Google makes thinking SO much easier. If Google had existed when I was in college, I could have spent the entire four years getting high and listening to Moby Grape, instead of just 87 percent of the time.

So anyway, I got Google Glass. It cost $1,500, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize that it's 100 percent tax-deductible if you write about it in this book.

What is Google Glass? It's a lightweight electronic device—sort of like a high-tech-looking eyeglass frame without lenses—that you wear on your head. On the front right side of the device is a tiny camera and a miniature screen that you can theoretically see with your right eye. There's also a tiny microphone and speaker. It connects wirelessly to the Internet through wifi or a Bluetooth phone. So basically, when you put on Google Glass, you are wearing a tiny “hands-free” computer with direct access to the unimaginably vast information resources of the Internet. Think, for a moment, about what this means.

It means you look like a douchebag.

Seriously, you do. There is no getting around it. My daughter, who has been my daughter for her entire life and therefore has developed a very high tolerance for being embarrassed by me, refused to walk into a restaurant with me until I removed my Google Glass.

If you go to the official Google website for Google Glass, you will see photos of attractive young people wearing Google Glass as they engage in a variety of modern youthful activities—biking, running, golfing, chopping organic vegetables, etc. Google has enough money to buy whatever it wants—Asia, for example—so you know they paid for the absolute best-looking photos of the absolute best-looking Glass-wearing individuals money could buy.

They still look like douchebags.

Am I saying you should not get Google Glass? No I am not. What I am saying is that in weighing your decision, you need to balance the advantages of wearing a vast information resource with numerous “hands-free” capabilities on your head against the fact that you
will
look like a douchebag. Also many people will automatically hate you and/or assume you are sneakily taking pictures of them. Even your friends and loved ones will, at bare minimum, mock you relentlessly. (My own wife, when I put on my Glass, said: “Fifteen hundred
dollars
? Why not just buy joke glasses at Party City?”
*
)

But let's look at the positives. You can control your Google Glass using voice commands, thereby leaving your hands free for other tasks in your active modern lifestyle, such as chopping organic vegetables. These voice commands begin with “OK, Glass.” For example, you might say, “OK, Glass, take a picture.” The Glass will then take a picture of whatever you're looking at, most likely a person looking back at you with a facial expression that is expressing the concept “What a douchebag.”

You can also use your Glass to (among other things) take video, send and receive emails, check your calendar, get map directions, search Google and view Internet websites—all on a tiny screen! Which unfortunately you can't really see. At least I can't, unless I hold my head very still at a certain angle, looking not unlike the way my dog, Lucy, does when she believes she has caught the scent of a distant turd.

But I am not one to criticize a product merely because it costs a lot of money and makes me look ridiculous and is hard to use. I wanted to know how Google Glass would function under “real life” conditions. So I field-tested it over the course of a weekend in Natchez, Mississippi, where I was attending a wedding. I used Glass to get directions to the pre-wedding brunch, and I am pleased to report that it worked: I was able to successfully navigate my rental car from the hotel to the restaurant by holding my head very still so I could see the tiny map on the tiny screen. Unfortunately, this meant that much of the time I was not watching where the car was physically going. Fortunately—and I mean this as a compliment—Natchez has a total population of twenty-three, so the streets were empty, and I failed to hit anybody, as far as I know. In Miami I would have killed dozens.

I also used Google Glass during the brunch. One of the other brunchers mentioned that he had heard that the famous bird painter John James Audubon had spent some time in Natchez. This was a perfect opportunity to tap into the vast information resources of the Internet. So I hastened out of the dining room to get my Glass, which I had chosen not to wear into the dining room because the other guests were mocking me for looking like a douchebag. But they changed their tune when I returned wearing my Google Glass and was able, within literally seconds, to inform them that I now needed to “pair” the Glass with my phone. This took several minutes.

Eventually I got to the Internet and was able, holding my head very still and appearing to stare off into space like a psychic communicating with the dead via a bad connection, to read through the Wikipedia entry for Audubon, one tiny screen at a time, until, after maybe forty-five screens, I finally informed the other brunchers that Audubon had in fact spent three months in Natchez in 1823. Unfortunately, by that point the brunchers already knew this and had moved on to other topics, because while I was “pairing” my Glass one of them had Googled it on his phone, which took him maybe ten seconds. But he had to use his hands. Ha-ha! What a loser.

Perhaps you feel I am being overly harsh. Perhaps you are thinking, “Surely there must be some nerd-tastic place where it's OK to wear Google Glass.” You are correct. There is such a place, and that place is: Google headquarters. Outside of that, however, Glass wearers seem to have an image problem. (For details on this, Google the term “Glassholes.”)

So my conclusion is that if you work for Google, or for whatever reason do not mind having people mock and/or hate you, and you have a spare $1,500 and would like to have a device that does basically the same things your phone does but not nearly as well—but it's “hands-free”!—then Google Glass is for you. It is not yet ready for normal humans.

I say “yet” because I assume Google is working on a newer version of Glass. In fact Google has asked Glass users to make suggestions for improving it. Here are mine:

• It should not make you look like a douchebag.
  Basically it needs to look more like glasses that a person with at least minimal self-awareness might actually wear.
  
• The screen should be much larger and more readable.
  You may think this suggestion contradicts the first one, but that's because you're not thinking “outside the box.” How about having the screen be a separate piece of equipment, which would be mounted on a service dog trained to trot in front of you? Or the screen could be strapped to the chest of another individual who's usually in your vicinity, such as your spouse or, if you are a busy executive who needs his hands to be free, a member of your staff. Or maybe Glass could have a tiny but powerful projector that would project words and images onto the forehead of whoever you happened to be talking to.
  
• It should recognize people and tell you who they are.
  This would bail you out of those awkward moments when you encounter somebody you
  know
  you know, but you can't recall who it is:
  

PERSON:
Hello!

YOU:
Hello, um . . . (
listening to Glass
) . . . your mother. I mean my mother. I mean, Mother! Hello!

• It should have the capability of squirting fake blood on your forehead.
  This would enable you to get out of meetings.
  
• It should have X-ray vision.
  Come on, Google. You know you can do this. You're
  Google
  .
  
• It should feed you clever insults.
  Let's say you're standing in line at Starbucks and somebody butts in front of you. This is the perfect time to hurl a clever insult, but too often your brain can't think of one. At least my brain can't. Usually the only thing my brain comes up with—especially if I have not yet had coffee—is, quote: “Hey!” But suppose Google Glass were programmed so that if you said a trigger word—“Hey!” for example—it would immediately search the Internet for classic insults and clever comebacks and feed them into your ear:
  

(A person butts in line ahead of you.
)

YOU:
Hey!

PERSON:
Oh, were you ahead of me? Sorry! After you.

YOU
(
listening to Glass
)
:
Madam, I may be drunk, but you are ugly, and tomorrow I shall be sober.

PERSON:
OK, first, I'm a man. Second, I'm saying go ahead.

YOU
(
listening to Glass
)
:
You're so fat, you put mayonnaise on aspirin!

PERSON:
OK, then, fuck you.

YOU
(
listening to Glass
)
:
I know you are! But what am I?

• It should be able to shoot pepper spray.
  In case the clever insults are not well received.
  

If the next version of Google Glass incorporates these improvements, plus some kind of invisibility cloak, I will definitely buy it. Of course I will also buy it if it's worse than the current version. I will buy it if it looks like a bedpan attached to my head with a jockstrap. I will buy it if it has an electrical glitch that causes it to burn swastikas into my forehead. I will buy it because it's
new
.

I know what you're thinking: I need help. I need to cure myself of this insane addiction to useless gadgetry. You're absolutely right. I
do
need help. And I am making an honest effort to get it. I have reached out for answers.

But I can't read them on this stupid screen.