Waiting

"Patience is a virtue." – My mother, every time I was impatient. Which was often.

I've gotten worse, too.

When I was little (no walking to school stories, I promise) we had no Internet. If I wanted to look something up, I had to walk over to the bookcase, find the appropriate volume of the encyclopedia, find the article that would answer my question and then look up associated bits and pieces by pulling out different volumes. There was no instant lookup. There were no links.

When I was little and needed to change the television station, I had to get up and walk to the TV set and physically change the dial. There were only three basic channels and eventually, there were a few more added. If I wanted to know what was on any of the channels, I had to look it up in the TV Guide kept out and handy on the side table next to Dad's chair. And then put it back in the right spot.

If I wasn't around when lunch was cooked and then wanted to heat it up, I had to use a pan and stove. No microwaves. Those came out later. I bought myself one for a wedding present, but before that … stovetop. Or wrap things up in foil and heat it up in the oven. Better be home when a meal was served because the reheating process was odious.

If I was out and about and needed to phone home, I had to find a pay phone. I had to wander around, find the phone, have a dime handy, and then place the call. Then I had to hope someone was home to answer the phone because there was no answering machine.

We had a popcorn popper that looked like a wok with a huge yellow tinted top. To get popcorn, you put oil in the wok and let it heat and then added the popcorn and put the lid on. As it popped, you had time to melt the butter in a special cute little saucepan. Eventually there was popcorn. And it tasted a whole lot better than the microwave kind. But it took forever.

The coffeepot was very odd. Mom had a drip coffee maker. Anne had a percolator. Mom's coffee was made by putting already boiling water into the top piece, and it dripped through to the coffee grounds where it was filtered through to become coffee. Anne's electric percolator heated the water and then spurted it up through the coffee grounds. Any coffee not finished before it got cold had to be heated, again using the stovetop.

I finally got online in 1995. We got our second computer and this one had a modem. I signed up with AOL and had my dial up service. Every time I wanted to get online I had to start my computer which took minutes, then click on the AOL program and wait for it to load, I told it to sign on, the modem started up, dialed the number, tried to get a server, did its computer things, and I got the guy saying Welcome, you've got mail. Well, hopefully he said that. I had a modem with a 2600 baud rate. Whew.

Eventually I got broadband and eventually that got faster, too. My computer is always on and always online. When I need to look something up, I come to my office and shake the mouse waking my computer. I click on the browser, open Wikipedia and type in what I need. Unless its something I type into Google and then click the links through.

When I'm in Wikipedia and reading things – actually just about any site – there are links where I can click through. Any questions can be immediately answered. I have the world at my fingertips.

I grew up with black-and-white TV and now I have You Tube. And now I get impatient when You Tube buffers. I get cranky when the ads take so long to download and the content won't show until they finish, that I often just click off the site entirely.

I used to be able to wait for something to happen. Not always as patiently as my mother would like, but with a little more equanimity than I can muster today. With the world only a click away, I've gotten more and more impatient. When my computer stalls or bogs down, when a file doesn't load instantaneously, I'm angry.

When a link doesn't work, I become upset. Lately, on MWC, there have been problems with stalled access and messed up notification of board postings. Now really, this is not the end of the world. But I get so impatient. All I have to do is click refresh or hit F5 and the new stuff appears. Is that really so hard? Well, apparently it is.

My mother is up in heaven shaking her head. Patti, patience is a virtue. I do believe I can hear that being whispered.