Future Shock is Now

This morning, after a less than restful night of having anxiety dreams about losing my Sony Reader, I remembered I needed to phone in my prescriptions for refills. I phoned the pharmacy, and using the touch pad, I keyed in my refills on the phone. Clutching the telephone in my hand, I then caught myself trying to change the T.V. channels with the telephone. Oops. This is what I get for forgetting to set the timer on the coffeemaker for auto brew.

I then had a thought: "Where were we before we had all these time saving devices, and just where is all this time we are saving?" I believe I have the answer: We are putting together our own furniture. Remember when they would bring you furniture, take away the old stuff, and you lived happily ever after? Now we go to the giant everything store, load-up our carts, haul the stuff home, after using self-checkout, which is promoted as saving time and money. (Not moi, I REFUSE to use it. "Self-checkout" is just another way of spelling "the-end-of-civilization".) Then we mull over the "easy assembly" furniture instructions (in Swedish), if we are lucky. If we are not-so-lucky (me) the instructions include how we can get the instructions online, as the Eco-conscious furniture people are trying to save the trees. We go online, are briefly distracted by the shear volume of spam cluttering up our email, and then remember that our task when booting-up the computer was to find the instructions for assembling the furniture. If all goes well, the website is still in operation and we are able to print them up on our printer. So much for saving the trees. At least the furniture manufactuers have clean hands. If we are not so lucky (me) we get video instructions. Never mind that the computer is upstairs and the furniture is downstairs, and I can't remember my own phone number half the time, let alone that "H" fits into "N" after watching the video twenty times. After running back and forth between the construction project and the computer, we finally get the damn thing together. We are faced with a pile of packing material that we really feel guilty about tossing in with the other trash, but there are not enough hours in the day to recycle all of THAT. Then we are stuck with the old piece of furniture we were replacing. Which, provided it isn't a mattress, we haul to the Salvation Army, or some other charity in hopes that someone else can use our discard. (A cautionary note: I have had my primo junk rejected by the Salvation Army. That's right: The stuff I was content to use for years, the Salvation Army REJECTED.) I don't know what you do with an old mattress. I'm pretty sure the Salvation Army doesn't want it. I guess I'd have to boot-up the computer to figure-out where to take that, after I get done deleting all my junk email.