Dependence on the Computer and Yellow Kiwi

Kiwi: photo by Kormmandos at zooomr.comA little incident the other day caused me to start contemplating my dependence on computers. Not really in a bad way. I don’t care. I don’t intend to make any changes. It’s just curious how life has changed. I didn’t have a computer prior to 1996. 12 years later and this little box holds proof of my life.

Think for a moment about the things you personally could not do without your computer.

Here are a couple of mine:

• I could never go anywhere because I don’t have a map
• I could never call anyone because I don’t have a phone book
• I would not know that there is a traumatized elephant in Dallas or that circumcision somehow helps to prevent HIV without my RSS feed to the NY Times science and health sections
• I would never understand my 16-month-olds behavior without faithfully reading my weekly updates from babycenter.com

So you get the point.

The other day I was making fruit salad. In this case it was a blend of grapefruit, green and purple grapes, strawberries, and kiwi. I cut the end off my first kiwi and it was yellow. I thought it had gone bad. I picked up a second kiwi and sliced the end off. Yellow. Now I’m getting angry. These stupid things were $0.50 each and I bought 4 and YES, $2.00 is a big deal to me.

In an effort to determine what was going on I hopped on my computer and typed “yellow kiwi” in my Google search bar. 2,770,000 returns. Whoa, that’s a lot of bad kiwi. So I’m starting to catch on. I visit the first link and learn that the yellow kiwi is a Zespri Gold from New Zealand. It is also less hairy which I hadn’t really noticed and it is sweeter than the green variety. I visited a few other sites then to read about other people faced with my initial confusion. It’s always nice to get confirmation that you’re not the only clueless soul on the planet.

15 minutes later, convinced that my yellow kiwi were safe to eat I returned to my chopping block to continue slicing and dicing at which point I noticed the familiar grocery sticker on my kiwi. I read, “Zespri Gold New Zealand.”

My computer has been known to save the day but in this particular case, perhaps a bit of common sense would have done just as well.