Technology can be funny sometimes. Some advances you know right away will be good for humankind. Others… not so sure.
For instance, I was scrolling through Facebook the other day when I came across an ad. I know. Huge surprise. And ad on Facebook. Honestly, I am starting to forget when the last time I saw a post by anyone on my friends list. The entire thing has become just a long string of ads with occasional interruptions of suggestions of things you might be interested in, which I am rarely interested in. But that’s a story for another day.
I was looking through Facebook and saw an ad for a “cordless wheelbarrow”. It took me a minute to let this sink in. Aren’t all wheelbarrows cordless? It is kind a complex machine, but fairly simple. I combination of a wheel and a lever put together in such a way as to make loving around heavy loads fairly easy. Cords are usually not involved.
But apparently there have been great improvements to the wheelbarrow. I found out because my curiosity got the better of me and I had to Google “cordless wheelbarrow”. Which, of course, means my Facebook page will soon be full of even more ads for cordless wheelbarrows.
What I found for results for cordless wheelbarrows is that the simple wheelbarrow has become powered in some cases. Sure, you can get the original. You know, basically a big bucket on a wheel with two handles. Some of those came up as “cordless wheelbarrows”, since they require no sort of cord for any purpose.
But then there were others. Electric wheelbarrows with little motors to drive them around your yard. Some had little lift contraptions built into them. Kind of like a mini forklift.
I’m not sure if there ever was a corded model of any of these, but there are now many cordless types. They are kind of little garden carts that will carry your things from place to place with little to no effort on your part.
I have not yet informed my dog of this major development in technology, because I’m sure it would bother her. Because now I no longer need a dog to follow me around the yard and get in my way when gardening. They have a machine for that. All I need is an attachment to pick up tennis balls and drop them at my feet.
But the more I looked at these things, the more they made sense. I’m not getting any younger. And lugging those snow tires from the basement to the car every year isn’t getting any easier. And it can be so inconvenient carry garden tools around from one place to another when you can do the same thing by pressing a button.
But that’s the way these things seem to work. At first they seem kind of silly. And before you know it, you have to have one.
