“It's a do si do and tip of the hat,
One step forward and two steps back…”
Ah, the irony of progress.
It’s a common complaint to say the more we invest in “timesaving” devices, the more time that is wasted.
I personally don’t always buy that argument.
An example to prove my point: A serious storm cut through the area Tuesday. We heard it was bad before it reached us based on some of the tips we received from people upwind.
My personal favorite warning was, “The Internets down in Green River.”
When asked how the person knew this, the reply was friends were no longer texting back.
The thunder and lightning reached us first, though it wasn’t as serious as the storm from the previous week. Glancing out my window, things still appeared pretty clear overhead. Switching to the opposite side of the office, however, I could see a serious storm sliding along White Mountain, which was mostly obscured.
The pelting rain and hail that was reported in the area did not reach our side of town, but the power blip that was most likely associated with the lightning did.
The power winked off only long enough to reset the computers (it’s been a long time since I’ve been through a prolonged power outage). However, even with the lights still on we spent the next 45 minutes or so, people fluttered around to see what was lost, whose computers were still acting funky and what needed to be done to reconnect to the office’s network.
It was briefly noted by some older coworkers that this would not have been a problem in the days of typewriters and wax-cobbled proofs. Spellchecking a printed page takes longer than tapping Spelchek on the computer monitor, and the trouble involving the repositioning of all the elements on a literal board is not laughing matter either, but they don’t require a constant source of electricity.
I was a bit frenzied Tuesday afternoon for having “lost” about an hour, but then I began to rethink the situation.
I would counter the originally stated argument that we are reinvesting time rather than wasting it. There’s still the same number of hours in a day and we dedicate about the same proportion to working.
The major difference is we travel longer distances, coordinate with people that are farther away and can access more information in that same amount of time.
Of course one set of pros usually comes with its own set of cons. Stuff needs to be charged up, have programs updated and checked for bugs or else you’ll just be working with an expensive paperweight. And lightning strikes, of course, will have a greater impact than before we started wiring everything.
Maybe progress doesn’t involve taking extra steps forward or backward as much as coming up with cooler things we can do in the hamster wheel. We really aren’t going anywhere any faster than before (but check out the GPS/mp3 player that shows me standing still, and plays appropriate music).
Such is modern progress.
