When Did Minutes Become Hours?

I just saw a commercial for this new contraption for doing laundry called the "Bounce Bar." It's a bar that sticks to the inside of your dryer so you don't have to use a dryer sheet every time. It lasts about four months. And the commercials portray these busy moms talking about how it's "one less thing to do" and "saves them so much time." Blah... blah... BLAH! This just screams that America wasn't lazy enough what with all the fat men looking for their remote before taking 3 steps to the TV and the use of calculators for basic addition problems. Someone had to go and think this one up. Sure, it's convenient but when I take the time to ponder how busy I am and think about ways to help, the two seconds it takes to grab a dryer sheet out of the box doesn't come to mind as something to be cut out. If those take too long, then we should just omit Kleenex and just blow our noses into the air. They work exactly the same as the dryer sheets! That'd be pretty convenient. Boogers all over the place, but convenient.

Technology is great but it's just created an epidemic of laziness. Things are never fast enough, never convenient enough. It can always be better, but you can only update things so much before it gets redundant. I refuse to buy one of those newfangled 3D TVs because the day after I buy one, they'll introduce boxes you set on the floor that project the 3D images all over the room.

I work at a bank, one that has these handy dandy ATMs that accept deposits without envelopes. They just read the checks and count the cash. Very cool concept. But people LOVE to complain about them anyway. We just had a system problem where ours was running pretty slow, not snail or turtle slow... just slowER. We never heard the end of it, at least until it was fixed. And my all time favorite ATM complaint... some of these ATMs we have in town will let you feed multiple checks in at the same time and it will read them all at once. Ours feeds them one at a time, but this girl comes in one day, makes it a point to see my boss to tell him that we need to put in one of the ATMs that takes multiple checks in one feed. Give. Me. A. Break. Is two more minutes at the machine, if that, really going to kill you? No. These other ATMs are drive through ones, so it makes sense to cut as much time out as possible to save on idling cars pumping more pollution into the air. At ours, you have to park in the garage and come inside to use it. You already had enough time to come in, so stop bitching.

I could really go on for days on these habits of laziness we've let ourselves fall into. In my opinion, technology was at it's finest back in the mid 20th century. Identity theft was almost unheard of, there were enough conveniences to make everyday life easier but not too easy and people had real conversations because the Internet wasn't an option to expedite things. People enjoyed speedy things but it didn't make them all pissy when they didn't get it. It just blows my mind about the things people get irritated about now. If I wait in a drive through for ten minutes, I don't let myself get upset about the wait. As long as the customer service is good and they don't ruin my order, I don't care. Life is either enjoyable or not, and I have a hard time believing that it's all centered around the few precious minutes that we spent waiting to get something accomplished.