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April 23, 2006
Gadget Mom
My parents love all things electronic. They're both tinkerers, and I grew up surrounded by the latest Apple or IBM version of the home PC, along with countless other generations of personal technology products. When my parents were young and broke, they scraped together enough money to buy one of the first reasonably-sized calculators. They had a microwave long before anyone else. I learned my multiplication tables by using a program Mom wrote in BASIC. In the mid nineties, they both had watches that could send and receive email. When Mom and Dad went on a trip recently, they took two humungous bags filled not just with clothes and books, but with various electronics they couldn't possible part with for a week: satellite radios, a mini-camcorder, a laptop, palm pilots, cell phones, digital cameras, and a portable printer.
Given these tendencies, I was not all that suprised when Mom said she was bringing a laptop and printer on our trip upstate this weekend. We were heading to a meeting and I knew she needed to print some reports. I was a little bit apprehensive when she said that she planned to use the printer without an outlet. I kept suggesting that she could borrow someone else's printer upstate or find an outlet somewhere to use. I didn't fully understand what she was planning until she pulled out the printer IN THE CAR, while I was driving, and contrived a rather elaborate mobile home office on the seat next to me. She had to hold the adapter in the cigarette lighter while printing from the laptop and feeding paper in. In order to prevent the paper from getting stuck on its way out of the printer (which printed rather well, considering the fact that we were going 70 miles an hour in a rainstorm), she had to carefully route printed sheets away from the edge of the car seat and to a pile of paper on the dashboard. Now, laptop use in the car is widespread these days, but printing from the laptop? This is somewhat of a feat. I think she may have put off the printing of these reports simply so she'd have an excuse to use her laptop, portable printer, and new little laptop mini-mouse in the car. Just, you know, to prove it could be done and possibly to justify the ownership of a portable printer in the first place. Impressive, no? I'm wondering if somehow they'll contrive to get a refrigerator and microwave in the car for the next trip. At least that way we could avoid the awful rest stop food.
Update: Mom has informed me that Dad has already installed a refrigerator in his car, so all we're missing is the microwave. Mom has a bit of an obsession with RVs, too, so this might be the next addition to the collection.
Posted by csageday at April 23, 2006 12:58 PM
Comments
Um, wow.
I'm speechless on this one, maybe because I don't even own a car, never mind a laptop-with-wireless-internet-portable-printer-dc-powered-car-adapter-office.
Posted by: The Jeff Next Door at April 23, 2006 01:41 PM
Forget about the microwave. What you need is auto-pilot for the car so you can work on your laptop too!
Posted by: D at April 23, 2006 11:02 PM