I'll date myself if I tell you about how much tech has changed in my lifetime! But at least when I was a kid we could text. You just had to do it by going to Western Union and sending a telegraph. Cost a fortune to do it too.
But we had telephones, and you could make a call on them as long as the people on the party line weren't using it. Of course, we could only talk to someone within maybe a few miles distance. Otherwise you would get long distance charges, and dad would be on a manhunt for you when the bill came! It's cheaper for me to talk to someone in India or China today than it was to talk on the phone to my friend that moved 20 miles away when I was in high school!
When I wanted information, I had to go to a library and find a book about what I wanted to know. And to find it, I needed to know how to use the card file to look it up. (And, no, "card file" did not mean an electronic file on a computer. It was a real box with actual paper cards in it that you had to search through!) Writting a paper in school ws done on actual paper, with a pencil! After you finished your paper and found you needed to change something, you got your pencil back out and re-wrote the whole thing from beginning to end to fit the changes in. "Word processing" was not a term in the English language at the time. I still remember having a constant calous on my fingers where they held the pencil that lasted from the beginning of the school year to the end of it!
Everybody tells me how much easier everything is today with all our technology to help us along. Seems like when I was a kid it must have been just so much work to get anything done compared to how it is today. But you know what? My mom didn't work, and my dad only had one job, as a mechanic, and never worked overtime, yet they had a nice house with no mortgage and lots of good food on the table at every meal. I never knew what it was like to go to daycare or have a baby sitter because my mom and dad always had enough time for me. In fact, that seemed to be the norm for all my friends as well. I was no exception. When my parents wanted to go somewhere together, they took me along. We were a family.
So, if all our technology has made everything so much easier for us, why does everyone have to work so hard at multiple jobs? Why do kids have to live in daycare because both parents are too busy at work trying to make enough money just to get by? Why are we losing our houses and living in trailers, cars, or in the street? What went wrong?
