Bring Back the Good Ole Days

Bring Back the Good Ole Days


I am sitting here on a Sunday morning frustrated. This is not a good way to start a Sunday, a day in which I love, a family day, a day where I normally start with the Word of God. I should be full of praise, peace, goodwill towards man and getting ready to shower and dress for Sunday Worship. Instead, my blood pressure is steaming and I am contemplating a complaint letter to the world.

What have we done? Have we gone completely insane? Or am I just so bogged down by a hundred different passwords, user-names, secret codes that my mind can’t hold any more. As soon as I have them stored in the memory banks of my already over loaded head, “times up” the bell rings, change it. I need a password just to log into my home computer that is to keep sticky fingers and teens from crashing my coveted PC. At work, I have a password to open up, a password to get to the server, a different password to get to my work email and a password to get into our work station to begin to log in sales orders. Hard as I try to keep them all the same, every 90 days give or take, I have to change them.

I am swamped, over-loaded with passwords, even on my cell phone and work phone to pick up messages. On occassion I keep track by keeping a notebook filled with the many different passwords but am constantly forgetting where I put it or not updating it enough to keep the score. What is a person supposed to do? How do you keep track of all the numbers, names and secret knocks in your life?

Modern technology is supposed to make our life easy right? Right? We have email, cell phones, instant messenger, texting, Face Book, Twitter, Digital cameras and endless other ways to keep our loved ones and friends up to date. Yet we still have no time, we still cannot manage to stay in touch, we are too busy, too tired, too on the go to sit still long enough to have a meaningful conversation.

Modern technology has even made it possible, for a small fee, to pay our bills online, that is if you can remember your password, username and personal secret code. Which is what brought me to write this blog today as I spent the better part of two hours trying to log into one account, reset my password only to find the computer generated blankety blank is still rejecting my user id.The very user id that they sent me the verfied changed password to, can you hear the growl in my words as I hammer on the keyboard?

Don’t get me started on Customer Support that is a whole other blog for a whole other day. Suffice it to say, there is no such thing as talking to a real live human being any more. It is no wonder we are out of touch with our world we live in, no wonder we have become a frustrated society that has no time for anything or anyone. No one has time for us; we have succumbed to being nothing more than a computer generated email, a text message sent to verify we exist.

Take me back to the good ole days when we actually sat down and spoke face to face to each other, or how about writing a real honest to God letter that had actual words in it. I have grown weary of trying to decipher short-handed words such as (lol, idk, jk). Take me back to real customer service served with a kind voice at the other end of the phone and real help, not a computer generated email that keeps circling me around and around, or an automated voice that is requesting I push number 1 or 2 when I really want to scream.

I miss telephone calls from friends on real phones, even though we don’t have a land-line anymore and have been won over by the world of cells. I miss taking walks and really listening to words being spoken, letters in my mailbox, the kind that is out on the street and not inside my electronic computer. I love holding a picture in my hand and seeing it up close. I miss the good old days where human contact made things so special.

As I take a deep breath, letting the steam out of my highly frustrated body and relax a moment, this is not to say I am ready to give up my computer, or Face Book, for I do enjoy the instant gratification of seeing all those I love that has linked me to them. I don’t Twitter as I had to draw the line somewhere, my texting is minimal and I do enjoy emails. I still long to return to simple times, I think we have really lost something. Something of great value in our society and I really worry about what our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will never get to experience. The value of human contact and slowing down to enjoy one another, which is what life is really all about.

Just a small piece of mind, thanks for listening.

Teresa Gale
8/29/09