The cost of saving time
I hate relying on computers.
I feel this way despite the fact that without a compact electronic device to help gather information and relay messages while I am dividing my attention between any number of things, I would be lost.
And I mean this literally. Without GPS I might still be circling in lesser-known parts of the north country for days just trying to find my way south.
Not that I’d want to return to wrestling with the folds of a paper map — this is one genie that won’t get back in the jar — I just know technology hasn’t been the savior it was hyped to be back when Michael J. Fox was riding around in a Delorian with Christopher Lloyd.
What with hacking, data breaches, internet pests such as bugs and worms, I find it odd that the thing that irritates me most about our advance toward advancement is how much it costs us to save time.
I’m old enough to remember when computers were supposed to save the planet from being awash in paper. How fast and accurate the transfer of information would be. How information would be democratized.
I didn’t want to be a naysayer, but I knew mistakes would still happen, only now they’d seem more official.
That’s what happened back at the turn of the century when my doctor’s office changed over to computerized prescriptions, anyway.
Doc ticked the wrong box and my prescription for ten days of antibiotics turned into a two-day supply at a higher dose.
With a new script ob-
tained when my infection came raging back on day three, the pharmacist said the previous one had seemed odd but was so terribly legible he didn’t bother to question it.
Nearly two decades later, I’ve finally given up on my trusted paper calendar. Those of you who have your favorite model Week-at-a-Glance will understand the strange feeling of loss.
And those who have already missed a few appointments in the first quarter of the year will blame their fat fingers, which may have scrolled when they should have typed.
Anyway, that’s the reason I was giving for missing concessions duties at the basketball games last Wednesday. I had it on my
electronic calendar; I had just saved it under Saturday’s date.
I never even questioned the iCalendar’s authenticity.
To be brutally honest, I never would have believed our time slot to sell Swedish fish and Gatorade would have been pinned to a school night even if I’d seen it on paper in my own loopy script.
But crazier things are known to happen.
You know, like an early spring blizzard or a late winter heat wave, which is exactly what I thought as I scrolled through the weather forecast on my phone and found a roller coaster of temperatures.
“Can you believe it’s going to be 70 degrees tomorrow,” I said, to like, the 14th per- son that day? Mostly they voiced a climate change acceptance that a 40-degree swing would take place a few days after we’d been buried in snow.
Except for one person, who, as weather apps would have it, had just checked in with hers.
“No, actually; I don’t believe it.”
Which made me wonder about the accuracy of the information at my fingertips I had just taken for granted.
It turns out she was right. I had been checking the weather in New Zealand.