I’m telling you, Susan, technology is helping them immensely!

Oh, hello reader, I was just telling Susan here about a wonderful new thesis I’ve just cooked up. It’s about technology, and more specifically, how it’s helping the handicapped. Now this is serious, no funny-ha-ha nonsense.

Let’s talk about hearing aids. For years, these big beige monsters stuck so far out of the handicaps’ ears you would’ve thought they got HBO on those things. I mean I could at least make the joke back then—Sopranos, anyone? Anyway, years pass, the hearing aids get smaller, but still noticeable. A lot of people are so embarrased they won’t even wear them, leading to traffic accidents, swimmer’s ear, many kinds of small accidents—manicures instead of pedicures, appetizers instead of hour de oeuvres—everything was going wrong. Economic inefficiencies, market failures—you name a problem in this article, it happened.

Anyway, a few years pass, then a few more, and everyone’s talking on cell phones. Yap yap yapping away in the car, in the home, at the workplace—everyone’s going mobile. A few more years pass, and bam!—everyone, or a lot of people, are going hands-free. Walk down a street in NYC this evening, and look around. No crime, right? You can thank Guiliani for that. But what else do you see? Men, women, children, the occasional dachshund, talking on their Bluetooth headsets. At first, the joke was that these guys are crazy—looks like they're talking to themselves, right? Yeah, so now it’s not so funny. What’s funny now is how stupid they look, and how it lets every Hellen Keller in the place wear whatever they want on their ears, and it’s just cool. For a while, we thought the popularization of Secret Service movies was going to ring in the hearing aids, but they never went too mainstream, but now we got the Bluetooths. Anyway, congratulations to the deaf—ha, ha, can you hear me now?

So that’s the first one. I got another, though. Insulin pumps, iPods—need I say more?