The Good Old Days

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Alphonse Kerr
"There is nothing in this world constant but inconsistency." Jonathan Swift*

People, places, things, and ideas all have history.

There are exceptions of course, like many large public corporations that shun history, because that would require admitting mistakes and being more open to criticism than otherwise.

But, back from the tangent, we seem to have lost our sense of history. We seem to have forgotten, intentionally or otherwise, about some fairly simple things...

° The expectation of good Customer Service. The words are still used, but it's a rare thing to really experience these days.
° The expectation that phone service works, connections aren't broken, and you can actually hear the person on the other end.
° The expectation that consumer products are built to last, but can be repaired locally if needed at a small fraction of the replacement cost.

I have a VHS VCR that I bought about fifteen years ago that, until recently, made better tapes than a reputable-name-brand S-VHS VCR I bought much more recently. When I made tapes with the old player for friends, I got asked if I'm using professional equipment (I'm not).

There are always trade-offs and compromises, you may say. What we have given up in quality and service, we have gained in convenience. Yes, the convenience to drive a car while simultaneously looking at a map on the GPS, eating 1500 calories of carry-out food, and entering data into a PDA. Priorities seem to get a bit out of kilter. Does one really need to answer a cell phone while in the bathroom stall? In a movie theater? In a meeting? We seem to be encouraging people to accept interruptions. Now you may be saying that I must be an elderly technophobe. Far from it. I like my gadgets as much as the next person (maybe more). I just think that we should use them reasonably, and that we should control our time and our lives rather than letting the gadgets do it. When the phone rings, I look at the Caller ID and make a conscious decision about whether I should stop what I'm doing and answer it (particularly if I'm in the middle of a conversation). After all, isn't that one of the things that voice mail is for? Couldn't we all use a little more Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, a little more Miss Manners, and a little less thrashing about in an ADHD-like state?

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* When I was double-checking the source for this quotation, my first Google search came up with only one hit, which happened to be in a file with many other good quotations, including:

"In principle I am against principles." Tristan Tzara
"All generalisations are dangerous, even this one" Dumas fils
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form" Karl Marx
"All modern thought is permeated by the idea of thinking the unthinkable." Michel Foucault
"The supreme triumph of the reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity." Miguel de Unamuno