The new coolest gadgets are always hot items to put under the Christmas tree, but I can’t help but notice that the race to have the coolest technology is crossing into ridiculous. Do we really need all this junk?

A prominent TV provider is advertising a new DVR system, where you can have your set on in one room, pause it and then move to another room and resume play. In the commercial a handsome fellow is sipping what looks like a beer, and wandering about his house, switching on TVs as he goes. 

Who has that many televisions? If you really have so many TVs that you need to meander throughout your house, turning them off and on, pausing and un-pausing, you really need to re-evaluate where your hard earned money is going. 

Does this company not realize that this technology has been available since the dawn of cable TV? Yes, you can turn off your TV, move to another room, and BAM! The same channel can be on your second TV. 

I imagine the benefit of the DVR is the fact that you can download movies to your TV, but again this is technology that has been around longer than I have. Did you know, that a tape and a DVD can pop right out of their respective players, and move all the way down the hall to another TV if it must?

In continuing my complaint about TV, why do we need it on our phones? My phone offers this service for $10 a month, but why would I want to watch TV on a two inch by four inch screen? The phone-TV seems counter-productive to the advertising telling us we want a bigger and better TV. 

The second bit of technology I can’t understand is the iPad. First of all, I’d lose it being so small, and they seem complicated – what’s wrong with a good old fashioned keyboard?

My boyfriend Josh and I were staying at a hotel in Kansas City, Mo., this summer for a wedding. Josh needed a haircut, so we stopped at the concierge. The woman had a brand new iPad, and offered to search up a barber shop (Josh is particular about his hair, in that if it costs more than $10, he won’t cut it). She fumbled with the tablet, trying to figure out how to hold it and struggled to type on the touch-screen. We waited about 10 minutes, while the clock ticked down to when we were due at the rehearsal dinner. 

In the time it took her to locate an internet window, type the search terms out and give us an answer, I could have cut Josh’s hair myself, and we would have been well over the ensuing humiliation that would have been caused by me screwing it up. 

Long story short, Josh got his haircut, but the place she sent him to was an up-scale salon with a minimum $40 payment for a simple clip with the razor. Josh ended up finding a cheap little barber shop somewhere on his own. 

Another bit of technology foiled us on our trip – the TomTom GPS. Driving down from Whitehorse we got stuck in a northern Alberta monsoon. I’ve never been to Edmonton without getting hopelessly lost, and this time would be no different. The TomTom told us to turn right to by-pass the city, but the road no longer existed. All that was left was an endless construction site. This confused poor TomTom, and we were thrown into the middle of downtown Edmonton with no idea where to go. The GPS continued to tell us to do a U-turn which was not helpful advice in rush hour traffic, further complicated by the hurricane-force winds. 

As Josh likes to say, we ended up using a “mapmap” and getting out of Edmonton, no thanks to TomTom.  

DISCLAIMER: The Last Word is an opinion column, it is meant to provoke thought and debate. As such, any opinions written here are the writers own and do not reflect the viewpoint of any other Fitzhugh staff member or the directors of the Jasper Media Group Inc.