5 03 02

I’m
going to ask this question and I’d like you to respond by holding
up your hands, unless you’re driving and reading (which you
shouldn’t be doing anyway) or operating some dangerous power tool,
or cooking or, well, just forget about it, I wouldn’t be able to
se how you would vote anyway.

What I’d like to know
from this survey is for you to tell me if you think that with all of
the labor saving devices we have had offered to us over the past 50
years, has your life: (A) gotten easier and you now find yourself
having oodles of free time left in the day to enjoy whatever you
like to do or (B) your life has become a living hell since you have
too many things to keep track of as well as too many choices to make
forcing you to be on Prozac, aspirin, wine and yoga all at the same
time.

I suspect the majority of
you voted for Item # B, since everywhere I go I hear people
complaining that they aren’t getting enough of any or all of the
following…sleep, money, fishing, food, exercise, sex and so on and
so on. Case in point, when I was a kid some years ago, we only had
to remember 3 phone numbers… these were: our house, where our Dad
worked, and the phone number to our grandmothers house. Can you do
this today? Forget it. Nearly everyone has a phone number, a fax
number, a cellular number, a pager number, an e-mail address, a web
site…in addition to someplace to actually send mail. This of course
can be a mailing address, a physical address or a post office box.
These are not the same places by the way. I almost forgot, you would
probably need another number to retrieve your voice mail messages.
In my book that adds up to possibly seven or eight numbers for each
and every person you and I know. Far too many to remember.

So we have to have things
to help us keep all of this stuff organized. Ergo, the PDA or a
computer or something else to store all of this new information. On
top of this we have a passwords and user names which enable us to
get into our checking accounts and access our cell phones for
messages. When we first started using passwords you could do
designate something simple like your dog’s name…..so Rover was easy
to remember. Not so today, now you have to have 5 letters and 3
numbers, which means that unless you were weird and named your dog
Rover 409, if you’re like me you’ll have a hard time remembering
what galactic interstellar code you need to see if you have enough
cash in your checking account to buy some hot dogs and a few beers.

Now, in addition to our
needing some form of organizer to keep track of the phone numbers
and ways to get in touch with our Grandmothers, we now need
something to keep up with all of the passwords and user names we
have assigned to us for each and every account that we want to use
from time to time. Enough to drive you crazy isn’t it? The other
day, I called in to initialize some new credit card….they wanted to
know where my Mother was born, in case they needed to ask me for
security purposes. I don’t even think I remember where I was born,
much less my mother. You can’t take the chance of writing all of
this down on something simple like a piece of paper simply because
if you do and it gets stolen, your entire life is over as you know
it. Someone can take your identity.