Cassi Creek.
Twenty-five years ago that line made more sense than it does today. E-mail was not a common household or personal
tool. Cards, letters, bills, and all
manner of communication on paper existed only in the form now called “hard
copy.” Now we deal with e-mail, voice
mail, instant messages, text messages, and a rapidly increasing number of ways
to hasten the flow of more or less valuable bits of data while the hard copy
data transfer becomes less and less the norm.
We send very
little hard copy mail now. What we send
is mostly greeting cards to family members.
We still receive our bills in hard copy form, but we pay them
electronically. We’re of the generations
that still trust computers to savage us in some manner, leaving us lacking the
information we so carefully stored on our hard drives, and on various
generations of floppy disks, tapes, and CD-rom s. Of course, we no longer have the hardware to
read and utilize floppy drives of any size and tapes. Our newest computers are being built without
an internal hard drive or a means to read CD’s.
We are expected to purchase software on line and down load it to our
machines by way of the “cloud.” Our data
storage, they tell us, is secure, safe, and readily available even though it
exists only in the nebular, semi-mythical “cloud.” Is it any wonder that our backup consists of
paper files?
All of these
electronic communications travel between various hardware devices at immense
velocities. Megabytes of information are
exchanged within seconds. We’ve become
used to rapid response and now apply the standards of computer data transfer to
all forms of verbal communication.
We’ve made
great strides toward downgrading our language and grammar knowledge and
utilization. 4U is not a word, CUL8r not
a sentence. Two people engaged in a
conversation, converse, they do not conversate in a convo.
However, not
all things take place at internet speeds.
Letters and other items that use our traditional postal service for
delivery, still move much the same as they did in the last century. The methods for collection and delivery are
still dependent upon carriers picking up mail from collection points and
delivering it to people’s mailboxes.
Between pickup and delivery, each item goes through sorting and
distribution to the proper post office and route for delivery.
I’m waiting
on a letter, or a collection of documents from the Veteran’s Affairs regional
office. It was most likely mailed
Tuesday, from Nashville. It will be
contained in a standard 8x11 manila envelope.
I had hoped it would arrive today.
No such luck. VA has my e-mail
address and could have sent me the documents via e-mail as well as by hard
copy. I’ve never been very patient
when it comes down to things beyond my control.
There’s a lot riding on the information carried in these documents. So I’ll spend the rest of the day
pacing. There are two more delivery days
this week. If I pace enough, perhaps I’ll
walk off a couple pounds.
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