The Future
Sometimes I'm struck by how impressive the technology I use everyday is. The other day, I was riding to work on the subway and listening to a podcast on my phone. I wasn't enjoying it very much, so on when the train crossed the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I downloaded a new one to listen to. Roughly ten years ago, I wasn't sure that I would ever be able to afford a cell phone, and five years before that, the file I downloaded would have taken a hour on a wired connection in the comfort of my own home. Neat stuff.

I like to think that because most of this sort of convenience enabling technology has appeared during my lifetime that I would be able to manage without it. If I really needed to research something, I could do it in a library. Hell, I worked in a library in high school. I kind of know the Dewey decimal system.

However, yesterday I made my first adult doctor's appointment. Before I could make the appointment, I needed to find a doctor. I asked a co-worker who she used. I called that doctor and found out they were not taking new patients until February. Yikes (a side lesson here is that doctors in NYC are very busy). What followed was a journey through my insurance provider's online list of doctors, yelp lookups, google map locating, reading reviews on other sites and calls. Eventually I found someone that had decent online reviews that would give me an appointment within a reasonable amount of time. They are going to email me the new patient forms so I can fill them out before I come in. At the end of the process, I realized that with the exception of the calls (made from the futuristic cell phone I mentioned in the first paragraph...), none of the tools I used existed fifteen years ago. And I have no idea what I would have done. I suppose I would have used the yellow pages and made a lot more calls, but that seems so inefficient.