This morning, after a pointless (frustratingly so) hour of shopping for program props and not finding at all what I needed, I stopped in for some crickets (which I definitely didn't need, but the salamanders did) on my way back to the office. As I walked into the store the person at the checkout warned me that their debit and credit machine was down, so they'd only be able to accept cash. Later I overheard that not only were they offline, but their phone system was down as well.
That's like suddenly finding your pet store on a desert island in this day and age, really.
I don't think we all realise just how dependent we've all become on electronic gizmos today. I mean, even if you were a complete luddite about technology in your own home, all you'd have to do is go out the door to find yourself in a total web of electronic dependency. Everything from your car to your banking is tied up in the digital world whether you like it or not, and the only way you'd be able to get away from it is to go completely survivalist off-the-grid and hope never to see another human being again.
And even then you'd probably have to go for supplies eventually.
I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, by the way. It just is. And I think we tend to forget how comparatively recent it all is. We've all come to expect things to work in a way that thirty -- maybe even twenty -- years ago would have been unthinkable.
As an example, I can tell you for sure that if the store I'd walked in today with no phone and no interac was the grocery store I worked in as a teenager, there would have been no warnings of "cash only" necessary. Just about everything was in cash, because your only other option was a cheque. If a business tried to run that way now we'd think the owner absolutely insane, but only a couple of decades ago no one thought a thing about it. And forget about losing a phone line... Once we had all of the power go out, and our manager told us to keep putting orders through by tallying by hand. That's right. Not only did we not have scanners that day (or any day), but we didn't have tills. We checked things out as best we could by keeping a running count on paper. I'm sure it made inventory a holy hell to figure out afterwards, but no one would have considered telling the customers to go home just because we didn't have our fancy newfangled 'lectric cash registers to help us out.
And no, this didn't happen seventy years ago. And you kids get off of my lawn.
As I was getting ready for work the channel I had the television on was promoting a look at how the internet had changed learning. Forget about the internet -- electronics in general has changed everything. We depend on our electric aids. For better or for worse? Oh, I don't know. All I know is that my mother used to say every now and then that if you stopped to think about all the changes that our ninety-year-old next-door neighbour had seen in her life, it was like she was living in a completely different world now than the one she started in. Now? Sometimes I feel like that's already happened to my forty-year-old self.
It just makes a person wonder how much faster change can become before we find out that we can't depend on it, I guess. Or maybe it never will.
But I bet I could still tally up a grocery order if I had to. Even with the GST.
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