These ARE the Good Old Days

People often fret about how information technology is changing our lives, and it's easy to fret about the negative aspects, but really, there are always gains and losses. Yes, hardly anyone writes proper letters any more, but people can communicate more quickly and more often! The advent of Federal Express meant that the "grace period" between sending an important package and its receipt his disappeared - and now everybody wants everything yesterday!

Personally, I miss the old impact printers, which took an hour to print out a 20-page document; before background printing, there was nothing else to do while printing was in progress. The great thing was that it forced you to take a break and relax a little - and yet you were actually working, making progress, during this time. Sort of like playing shuffleboard while making your way across the Atlantic on a ship!

Some day, our grandchildren will listen with amazement as we explain that, in our lifetime, the world was such a freewheeling, innocent, Wild West sort of the place that it was perfectly normal for people to:

• Hop into a car and drive where ever they wanted - and if they changed their minds, just go off in some other direction!
• Enjoy a complete absence of advertising in so many places, like our cars, refrigerators, golf clubs, security alarms - you name it.
• Actually fill out paper applications for drivers' licenses, passports, and voter registration. All kinds of people had fake document created, and it sometimes took years to track them down.
• Pay bills after you got the money into your account.
• Tell people "the check is in the mail." People actually believed this! (Well, the first time, anyway.)
  
• Not answer the phone! Really! If someone didn't want to talk, they could just not answer!
• Lie about location! Back in the day, you could fly off to Vegas or wherever, then call in to the office with a groggy voice and say, "I'm not feeling well - I won't be in today." Back in those days, the boss had no way of knowing where you actually were when you called in sick - how cool was that!
• If you passed a pretty girl, you couldn't just query her ID and send her a signal of interest. Nobody had implants back then! If you didn't know her, you had to accost her directly (pretty scary), or follow her around and see who else knew her, and ask them what her name was, and where she lived, and was she married or not. Romance involved a lot of pure legwork back in the day!

So, rather than fretting about these piddly little invasions of privacy we experience today, let's all enjoy the wide-open frontier free-for-all that life today will appear to be in another generation or so! Let's just hop in that car and go... anywhere!