It Seemed Cool At The Time

In the midst of what should have been eleven consecutive days off, I found myself headed to work this morning. Due to an unexpected event a couple of weeks ago, my eleven days off became ten days off with a workday stuck in the middle. As you might recall, I tried to convince the boss to let me take an extra day off without pay, but he wouldn't go for it. My boss doesn't like to vary from the book. So I sat at my desk and worked on some stuff until about 2:30 pm today, when I bugged out. I was headed to the office this morning and when I was stopped at a light, a woman pulled up next to me in a fancy-schmancy new BMW. I was admiring the car and I got to thinking about how transient things are. The new is soon old and the rapid advance of technology makes the new old much sooner than it used to. A hundred years ago, more or less, the Wright brothers had the cutting edge technology in aviation. Now their creation is just a primitive artifact. People will someday see a picture of that fine automobile with the same thoughts that we have about the Wright brothers' plane. Even the aircraft of my boyhood half a century ago are relics now. I was born in 1950. There was a time when I was usually the youngest person in the room. Since the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I got married at 19 and daughter sneed was born when we were 20, our kids had parents who were younger than most. What happened? Now I am the oldest person in most situations. Times have changed. How much you might ask? Until I was about eight most families didn't have a TV. When we finally got one, it was black and white and I was the remote control. My old man would bellow, "See what's on 4", and up I would jump. We only had three channels and they went off the air after the ten o'clock news, but it was a marvel to us. My dad bought the first generation Polaroid camera in the late 1950's. It took instant pictures, if by instant you mean about 5 minutes of developing time. But this was a major leap from sending pictures out to be developed at the drugstore. Truly instant photos were decades away for the average Joe. My mom never drove a car or worked outside the home. My father never made more than $35,000 in a year in his life. When the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I got married, our rent was $65 per month and combined we made $129 per week, before taxes. My siblings and I stood in line to get polio shots and later oral vaccine. The eradication of polio stands as one of the great medical achievements of all time. A childhood killer tamed in a mighty swoop. Antibiotics were administered via a shot in the arm or the butt. I got strep throat and had to go to the doctor everyday for about a week to get a shot of penicillin. In 1963 I remember my dad predicting someone would invent a device to record TV so that it could be watched later. Fifteen years later, the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I got our first VCR. A couple of years later we got a microwave oven. And it wasn't because I was too cheap to get them sooner, I know what you're thinking. That's when they hit the market. In 1969 I worked for a major grocery store chain and the cashiers had to ring up every single item on a manual cash register. The stock guys had to stamp a price on every item in the store. Once a week we did price changes, where we had to erase all those prices and stamp new ones on items whose price had changed. Bar codes and scanners later made all that unnecessary. Now they are making cashiers unnecessary. Credit cards for the average shopper didn't exist until the 1970's. We couldn't imagine that anyone would charge things like groceries with a charge card. Everyone wrote checks and most people dealt in cash a lot. I know you think I'm kidding. In 1974 I bought a four-function, handheld calculator for about $100. Today it would sell for two or three bucks, but it changed the life of a guy taking freshman accounting and was a giant leap forward from a device called the ten-key adder. In the early 1970's eight-track tape players were all the rage, soon to be made obsolete by the cassette player, which in turn fell victim to the CD. The phonograph record went the way of the dodo bird. About that same time we got the first fax machine at work. It was called an LDX and it could only receive. The transmitter was a different unit and the bosses said we didn't need to send stuff anyway, so we didn't get one. It was about the same size as a refrigerator. I'm not making that up. I got my first personal computer in 1982. It was made by Timex and you had to write programs in the Basic language to make it do anything. It was a useless piece of crap, but seemed miraculous to me. About 1985 we got cable television here in our fair city and broke the stranglehold of the big three networks. The Bell system was dismantled and it unleashed the revolution in telecommunications. In the mid-1980's I got my first desktop computer. It had no hard-drive and everything had to be stored floppy disks. The monitor was available in black and white, black and green or black and orange. Color monitors were a thing of the future. The first modem that I ever used operated at 1200 baud. The really cool techies at work had 2400 baud modems. How slow is that? Think of a 56K dial-up modem and then slow it down to 5 percent of that speed. That's really slow, so slow in fact you couldn't use it for anything today, other than as a museum piece. Until the 1980's there was a strong answering service lobby that kept voice messaging service off your telephone. Pagers became the rage in the 1990's and the first cellphones, the size of bricks appeared in the middle 90's. Ten years later they are antiques. In about 1980 a fellow confidently told me that by 1985 all cars would come with CB radios as standard equipment. CBs died a quick death for the most part. Five years ago we bought a digital camera with a printer dock that let you print pictures at home. That was cutting-edge for about 3 or 4 months, before it became inefficient to do it that way, replaced by 5 better ideas. Anyway, I suppose sometime soon some older guy will explain to his kids that "back in the day" we listened to music on something called an Ipod, and poor folks didn't even have HDTV. Of course, back in the day, gets closer all the time. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor