The time change caught me by surprise this spring… I noted on Sunday morning that the time on the cable box didn’t agree with my bedside clock–so I checked the time on my cell phone to verify, and realized that we’d just “sprung forward.” And then I paused and thought what a strange world we live in, that we can be blissfully unaware of something like a time change and all (most) of our equipment self-adjusts around us. Just think how otherworldly it would have seemed to someone around the turn of the last century!
Indeed, I’m struck by the idea that most of the things that we do on a regular basis, like paying bills, adjusting clocks, and all the other little repetitive tasks of modern living, could easily be turned into automatic things. I’ve got all my bills on an automatic pay schedule now–all that I have to do is remember to leave enough money in my checking account to pay any upcoming bills. I’ve gotten spoiled enough that I dislike opening mail (as in the post-office stuff) and generally only do so if I get something from a person I know or that has “REMIT IMMEDIATELY” stamped all over it. (Actually, the one time I got something like that it was because the State of Ohio still wants me to pay them taxes that I don’t owe them. Speaking of which, I should probably check on that to see if I need to pursue it further.)
Between Roomba vacuums, automatic electronic payments, onliine shopping for everything from groceries to knitting supplies, it does seem that the self-regulating life isn’t too far in the future. Then again, people thought it was close back in the early parts of the last century (the Jetsons come to mind…) And we still had quite a way to go.
All the same, if my 10-year old self back in 1985-6 could have seen things as they are now, I would have been terribly impressed and probably annoyed at the inconveniences that I had to undergo whenever I was curious about something–I had to remember whatever had piqued my interest and go to the library to look it up, wrestle through internal library databases (which were generally straight off the card catalogues and not arranged according to any intuitive method) and then find answers in the enormous tomes in the reference section, which generally had only an annoying paragraph or two about the thing that I was curious about. Ahhh, it was a hard life, akin to walking uphill in the snow to school both ways and doing my homework on the back of a shovel!!!
