If given an option, I usually choose the old way. I still write snail mail letters, and I pay my bills the old fashioned way, like writing a check and sticking it in an envelope to be mailed. I hate cell phones, am pretty much opposed to internet marketing, distance education, and a bevy of other things . . . including, the work at home trend. According to Forbes, one in five Americans now work from home, and that number is going to increase by 60 percent in the near future. That doesn't sit well with me. People should get up and go to a workplace every day, do it like mom and pop did, stick with a tried and proven system of how a work ethic works best. But does it?
Researchers are saying that stay at home workers decrease traffic jams in cities, and that will save the country billions of gallons of gasoline and carbon emissions. That's a good thing. I think distance education is a shoddy way of getting a diploma. I like the old way best, the one where if you want a college degree, you go to a real college campus, sit in classrooms taught by real professors, and do the good old college student thing. But that's not possible for everyone. Doing that causes great inconveniences, is overly expensive, and it may not insure you of a quality education. For one thing, a quality education is pretty much a thing of the past. Nobody in this day and age expects a college graduate to know as much as those who went through college twenty years ago, much less fifty years ago. But more people have college degrees now, and that feeds the growing demand for employees who are promotable.
Old ways are to be held up as a standard in some respects, but they are no longer practical. Todays high school graduate, that budding college kid, is to some degree retarded by modern technology. Asking one of them to actually think is asking the impossible because they now carry their brains in their pocket in the form of some sort of electronic gizmo. As much as I detest that, it's the present and the future. If you can't keep up with developing technology, you end up functionally crippled. Old ways just don't fit the new world, and I can accept that.
I've got a cell phone in my pocket, but it just works to make calls. I don't text, don't use it to work the internet or anything like that. I've got computers, but I don't market anything, nor do I intend to. My wife does, but that's her thing. My thing is clinging to more fundamental things, doing it the hard way, the slow way . . . and by using my brain . . . you know, the one in your head. But I live in two worlds, and that can get confusing.
"We need a credit card, sir," the clerk says.
"But I don't have credit cards. I pay cash," I say, and get this stupid look in return. It's that dead-eyed,
slack-jawed look you get these days when dealing with people.
Lodging establishments and car rental places, for instance, won't reserve a room for you without a credit card number. That's an inconvenience to an old timer like me. No sweat 'cause I don't travel much and I never rent cars. If I don't have the money on me, I don't buy some things only a card can get you. My life is no worse off without them. I'm forced into some compromise with the new technologies available, those things that make life more convenient on the one hand and more obnoxious on the other. I'll compromise some, even admit that some of the changes for for the good of mankind . . . but I'll never give in to it.
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