I was talking to someone over the weekend and at some point, the subject turned to the pandemic. Strange, I know. I made the point that if we have to go through an event like this, I’m glad that we’re doing it now rather than 30 or 40 years ago. Back then, we’d be screwed.
All this working from home people are doing? Forget it. There’s no way the phone systems of the time wouldn’t die under the weight of all that attempted teleconferencing (don’t even get me started on party lines), and the postal service wouldn’t know what hit it if everyone had to mail every piece of paper back and forth. We worry about how overburdened our governments’ balance sheets are with all the extra spending as it is, but just imagine how much worse things would be if we had to try to keep millions more people afloat.
Sure, we can’t see our friends and families now, but dude, we can hit a few buttons and *see* our friends and families now. We’re currently carrying around in our pockets the sort of communication tools that ourselves 20 years ago would have thought were unthinkable.
Deliveries? That might kind of work, but I’m not sure it could be done on the sort of scale where most of the world would have had the ability to limit its contacts in a truly meaningful way.
And then, because I’m me, thinking about deliveries in the ancient times made me think about this here video. I watched it again, had a nice little laugh, and then wondered why I hadn’t posted it yet.
Be mad at our circumstances if you want. It’s hard not to be sometimes. but we all need to try our best not to take the things we have now for granted. Life could be so much harder than it is.
Oh, and remember to follow the steps in your manual. Great advice no matter what you’re doing or when you’re doing it.