The "Items You May Love...But No Longer Need" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading about a few items that you probably shouldn't buy anymore.  I began to read the story and immediately told my wife, who was sitting nearby, that she should forget about buying me a globe for my office.  

I can remember having a globe years and years ago, but during moves between houses a few times, somehow I lost track of the globe.  I always enjoyed seeing how far away from home our trips might take us when we travel.  Locations such as Italy and a few of the Caribbean islands were fun to locate and see just how far we were from out home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Most times it was about 8" to 12" in distance since the globe was fairly small.  Well, I have been bugging my wife to buy me a new globe sometime for a gift and I guess she knew better than me, since I just read that a globe is the #1 item that has outlived its usefulness.  Yeah...globes are nice, but the sheer amount of countries that have been founded, split off from other countries or renamed since WWII is pretty staggering.  So, an old, or even a new globe, might be so out-of-date that it wouldn't do me any good.  It seemed like a neat thing to have, but....  Another item that you should avoid buying for yourself or a friend is a conventional wristwatch.  

How many people do you know that actually wear a watch.  I used to have one on my wrist all the time when I taught school, but the crystal was always scratched and hard to read.  Today it is only a fashion statement when you wear a watch.  The wristwatch just isn't needed any longer, especially since your phone is probably in your pocket.  Many of you I'm sure don't even remember the rotary phones.  When my wife and I got married we had a rotary phone hanging in the kitchen on the wall.  

Neat yellow phone that had a dial that you used your finger to rotate to dial the number of the person you were using.  You can't program them with favorite numbers or even change the volume on them, so this is one more item you should forget about buying.  A fourth item would be a typewriter.

I can remember taking a class in typing when I was a senior in high school.  Loved the course and tried to beat all the girls in class as far as how fast I could type.  I can still type pretty fast and most times I have very few erroors.  But, since most people have a laptop that they can use and then send the information to a printer wirelessly, there is no need anymore for a typewriter, whether it be a manual or an electric.  The final item you should forget about buying is a medical encyclopedia.  

You know...a book about the human body.  The kind that every young boy in my elementary school loved to look at in the school's library.  Much like a globe, a handbook of diseases and symptoms for regular people is outdated as soon as it is printed.  A 2018 edition would have no information on COVID-19; even though the root disease of severe acute respiratory syndrome virus 2 was known at that time, the particular virus isn't identified until December of 2019.  Working with outdated information can be dangerous.  Just check online in places such as Mayo Clinic or national Institutes of Health if you need medical information.  So...there are the five items that you should forget about buying right now.  Hey, by next year there will probably be a few more items to skip buying, since items go out of date so fast now that perhaps the Mac keyboard I'm typing on right now will be out of date.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.