TECHNOLOGY AND PATIENCE!

            Do you want to hear something ironic? The theme that I had running through my head for this week’s column was patience and technology, and, wouldn’t you know it, my technology just exhausted my patience. Weird how that works sometimes, eh?

            You see, I was all geared up to get writing this column so I could get back to the TV for the baseball playoffs and such so I fired up the old desktop and it took longer for the darn beast to come alive than it usually takes me to write the whole column!

Did you hear a foot tapping incessantly? That was me. “Oh my goodness…this is taking foorrreeevvverrrrrr! Why isn’t instantaneous instantaneous? Hmmm? What is taking sooooooo long?”

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We’ve done it to ourselves, haven’t we? The technological advances have spoiled us into thinking that everything is going to be done immediately. We don’t have patience for anything anymore because we want what we want and we want it NOW!

            I have come to the conclusion that the single most valuable human attribute one must have to eliminate the most stress in one’s life is patience. My source defines the word “patience” as: “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” Is that even possible? I don’t think so. At least for me it isn’t.

            I have found that nothing will get the dander up and try the patience more than technology and the reason for that is because we are too impatient to teach our selves the right way to do things because we don’t have the time, or something, so we go ahead and try to learn on the fly, because, you know, it cant’ be that hard now can it, so we learn as we go and we have to do most of it all over again and so we get angry because it was supposed to be so simple and usually the only thing simple is the operator and on and on and on it goes. It’s just a vicious circle.

            Funny, or odd as it were, how the word “suffering” is used in the definition of patience. “Suffering” was exactly what I was doing while I was programming a new piece of technology that was supposed to be a “1-2-3 ENJOY” type of setup. HA! The “1-2-3” setup was four hours long! And it’s still not done! That would test the most patient person’s patience, don’t you think?

            Oh yes, by the way, just for your information…if you come across someone who is showing the signs of total impatient meltdown, like a husband or father or someone like that… whatever you do…don’t tell them to calm down. Tsk, tsk, tsk…fuel on the fire people…fuel on the fire. You might want to just back away or maybe leave the house for a little while. Just saying.

             Technology has improved our way of life in so many ways, in its very exasperating way, making it is a necessary evil and I just hope that I can find enough patience to learn how to use it.

            “Patience is not the ability to wait but how you act while you’re waiting.”- Joyce Meyer (1943-).