Phones! Newspapers! Real Estate! What Has Technology Wrought?
On the last leg of our road trip, I lost my I-Phone. I freaked myself out over the whole thing.
At the same time, though, it got me to thinking about what life was like before these handy little tools of the trade.
On a vacation, it was possible to check messages (they hadn't started to call them "Voice mail" yet) at filling stations along the route. You dialed a number, punched in the office code, and you could listen to your fan calls. But there was no piece of equipment to misplace, but finding a pay phone was kind of a pain.
Today, I started to think about the different businesses that are, thanks to modern technology, completely changed.
Telephones, of course, will never be the same. My mother had a gazillion shares of telephone company stock that, luckily for the family trust, her stockbroker sold a while back.
The newspaper I grew up with, The Topeka Daily Capitol, was as skinny as I'd like to be, just one more newspaper impacted by the Internet. And once we in Washington were at the mercy of the Washington Post Classifieds to publicize Open Houses. The Internet has changed all that.
And with respect to real estate, we have a lot of modern inventions to thank for making our lives easier, or at least more interesting.
I had several of them, along with their chargers, on my recent vacation. Phone, MacBook Air, I-Pad, I-Phone, and three digital cameras. And when I misplaced my I-Phone, at least I could borrow my sweetie's Android to check my voicemail and make calls.
Somehow, I'd rather carry a bigger handbag with all of the gadgets and chargers that look for pay phones that hadn't been vandalized.
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