How Did We Ever Survive Before Electronics?

It is amazing how we have come to depend on everything “fast.” We want our dinner and we want it now. So we pop something in the microwave and “presto” in five minutes dinner is ready. And we wondered how we ever survived without the microwave.


Then came the computer and we were really in trouble. We could type faster, save more documents, work faster, produce faster, think faster. But wait. There’s more. The Internet arrived on the scene. And we wondered how we ever survived without the Internet, much less the computer.

Our lives totally evolve around our electronics. Computers, laptops, notebooks, iPads, iPods, Blackberrys, Droids, - you name it, and we have to have “it” – and the latest version of “it” whatever “it” might be. Don’t get me wrong. Electronics definitely have a place in our lives. I have a laptop and a Blackberry. I have information on both which, if I lost said information, I would probably need to be shipped off to the nearest funny farm. In my kitchen, you will find a microwave, a coffee bean grinder, and a fabulous coffee maker, as well as the standard appliances, with all the fancy gadgets you can add. I enjoy using these and they do make my life easier. My point is when we get to the place in our lives where everything we do is controlled by one or more of those electronics, maybe we need to step back and re-evaluate what we are trying to do here. For those of you who have not yet had a coronary – keep reading.

I have two reasons for writing this:

1) About two weeks ago, my computer at work begins to give me strange messages—all of which were gibberish to me. I have a desktop computer made a well-known company (no names mentioned but it starts with D, ends in L and has 4 letters). My desktop is just over six years old. In dog years, that would be one trillion, four million, eight hundred thousand…you get the point. I mentioned these strange messages to my sweet hubby who knows a lot about computers. He graciously agreed to come to my office and investigate. He spent three hours doing all sorts of things to my computer, running all sorts of programs, muttering computer-eze, and finally declared “There is not enough memory on your computer.” He did something magical, thinking that would work. It did not. He tried something else and we left it on for the night and headed home. The computer was sicker the next day. Understand – everything I do at work is on the computer. All of my email, all of my correspondence, all of the financial work – everything I do is on my computer. So if the computer doesn’t work, I don’t work. As I write this (on my personal laptop that I brought to work with me) my hubby is on his way now to do some more investigating and hopefully repairing.



2) The other, and far more significant reason I am writing about this today is that for a large majority of the population, we no longer have face-to-face contact, or at least the more personal aspects of a telephone call or note sent in the mail. Husbands and wives talk more via email than they do face to face. Parents keep up with what their kids are doing via FaceBook or My Space. Friends send each other special little ditties about how great of a friend they are. We exchange birthday cards and holiday greetings via email and Twitter.

Hello??? Is there not something wrong with this picture?

So, before you send someone a birthday card or worse, a sympathy card, via the Internet, stop and think about what you’re doing. Don’t be that impersonal. Send them a real card. And oh yeah, you can find their mailing address (and pretty much anything else you want to know about them) on the Internet.



MARANATHA!







© Edwina E. Cowgill