Is it just me....
....or does it seem like the more technological gadgets and electronic thingamabobs we have to keep in touch with our friends and relations, the fucking harder it is to actually reach the bastards when we need them?!
I'm old school. For most of my life, there was no email, no IMs or text messages, no pagers and no mobile phones. People had phones in their houses (my best friend growing up actually kept hers OUTSIDE her house in a shed....and shared it with the neighbours) and had to be at home to use them. Some of them had answering machines and some did not, but all of them short of those on holiday or in hospital were usually reachable within 24 hours of the first attempt. EVENTUALLY people answered their phones or called back, and rarely if ever did phone tag exist outside a business context.
Today, though, all that's changed. People are THEORETICALLY reachable all the time. Damn near everyone over the age of 7 has a cellphone, complete with call waiting, email, text messaging, and AIM. Everybody and their grandmother has MySpace. I don't know anyone (including my own parents, who for people not terribly old, live in the fucking dark ages) who doesn't have internet access, at least one email address, and at least one form of IM service. Some folks still have pagers and land lines, and everyone.....EVERY FUCKING ONE.....has voicemail. Hell, there are even ways to get in touch with people that I know nothing of the use of....like this Skype thing everyone's talking about.
Bottom line is, in this day and age, you should be able to contact whomever you want whenever you want. But you can't. In fact, it's more difficult now than it ever was.
At the moment there are at least ten friends (NOT business contacts, mind you, but actual friends) with whom I'm playing exasperating games of phone tag. We no longer talk to each other, but to each other's voicemail, and occasionally respond to a text message. I have gotten to the point where I cannot even be bothered talking to a recording anymore. I have nothing further to say to anything that goes 'beep'. I call to talk to people, not machines, and it burns me quite a bit when I have to waste my precious WhenEver Minutes on one-sided chat to a voicemail server. I despise and abhor email and god forbid MySpace mail as a main form of communication, but it usually ends up being a last resort.....when I can be bothered. What can I say, technology has made me lazy and semi-brain-dead like the rest. It's way too easy to lose people in a giant pile of email.
I spit on your technology. Bringing people closer, my ass. Give me back my fucking rotary phone, at least it did its freakin' job.
I'm old school. For most of my life, there was no email, no IMs or text messages, no pagers and no mobile phones. People had phones in their houses (my best friend growing up actually kept hers OUTSIDE her house in a shed....and shared it with the neighbours) and had to be at home to use them. Some of them had answering machines and some did not, but all of them short of those on holiday or in hospital were usually reachable within 24 hours of the first attempt. EVENTUALLY people answered their phones or called back, and rarely if ever did phone tag exist outside a business context.
Today, though, all that's changed. People are THEORETICALLY reachable all the time. Damn near everyone over the age of 7 has a cellphone, complete with call waiting, email, text messaging, and AIM. Everybody and their grandmother has MySpace. I don't know anyone (including my own parents, who for people not terribly old, live in the fucking dark ages) who doesn't have internet access, at least one email address, and at least one form of IM service. Some folks still have pagers and land lines, and everyone.....EVERY FUCKING ONE.....has voicemail. Hell, there are even ways to get in touch with people that I know nothing of the use of....like this Skype thing everyone's talking about.
Bottom line is, in this day and age, you should be able to contact whomever you want whenever you want. But you can't. In fact, it's more difficult now than it ever was.
At the moment there are at least ten friends (NOT business contacts, mind you, but actual friends) with whom I'm playing exasperating games of phone tag. We no longer talk to each other, but to each other's voicemail, and occasionally respond to a text message. I have gotten to the point where I cannot even be bothered talking to a recording anymore. I have nothing further to say to anything that goes 'beep'. I call to talk to people, not machines, and it burns me quite a bit when I have to waste my precious WhenEver Minutes on one-sided chat to a voicemail server. I despise and abhor email and god forbid MySpace mail as a main form of communication, but it usually ends up being a last resort.....when I can be bothered. What can I say, technology has made me lazy and semi-brain-dead like the rest. It's way too easy to lose people in a giant pile of email.
I spit on your technology. Bringing people closer, my ass. Give me back my fucking rotary phone, at least it did its freakin' job.
posted by Róisín Ruaat 9:49 PM
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