The man was once a boy, and that boy remembers sitting in front of a large cream box which had a keyboard of mainly dark keys with a row of red ones at the top. He wasn’t sure why the television people had made such a thing but he enjoyed watching the items on screen move under his control.
A few years later that same boy was sat in front of a grey box which had a little smiley face on the screen when you turned it on. It made funny noises and took small rigid discs into a slot on the front just under the screen and had a keyboard and a mouse, all in the same colour. It had a little brightly coloured logo on the front and he remembers that the entire operating system fitted onto a floppy disc (an oddly named item that, by that time, was no longer floppy).
He used similar beige boxes for a few years and before he knew it he was working in an office and was using one all the time. It was grey and had was a little different to the ones the boy had used for all those years. He soon learned how to use it as it wasn’t that different from all the other ones he’d used before, although it was a little more confusing, even more so when a few months later he got a new thing for it which was even more different. But then it was 1995.
Since then the boy has finally realised he is a man, and until recently has stuck with those same kinds of computers, the one he uses at work was the same as the one at home and he learned many tricks to using it efficiently. He continues to use it at work and at home, but now he also has a different type of computer at home, one which reminds him of those early days and the smiley face and coloured logo. When he got the new computer he was quite excited, and spent a little too much time just faffing about with it but now he’s settled down and both the new computer and his old computer exist side-by-side happily.
However in the past few months the boy who is now a man has realised something. It’s not a new thought, and he’s pretty sure the purchase of the new computer put it to the back of his mind for a while, but he’s realising that these boxes, with all their wonderous capabilities, are starting to bore him. It may be what he is doing with them that is the problem, perhaps he is stuck in a rut and needs to reconsider how he spends his time but he now looks at his computers and sees what they really are, tools.
He wonders if he is bored of these things. Bored with staring at them all day, bored with how he uses them, and he wonders if he should put them away or embrace them fully and explore their hidden depths. He knows he will always come back to them regardless, but perhaps now is the time to refocus, rethinking and reconsider.
He wonders if he will ever return to the glee of seeing his first pixels dance across the screen, he wonders if this is a temporary lull like the ones before him, he wonders why he continues to return to this thread, suggesting there is something deeper, a fundamental realisation he has yet to grasp.
He decides to stop for now and wait and see what happens as, the boy now knows, time helps everything.
