HOW MANY HOURS do we waste waiting for our thinking machines to do their thing?
Browsers to load. Files to open. Printer jobs. Email delays. Forms to register. TFA codes to arrive. And a hundred other petty inconveniences that result in impatience, lost tempers, and general cussedness.
Now, I am a patient man, but I swear – if I had a dollar for every minute spent waiting for my machines to catch up to my schedule, I could retire to my own private Idaho. It’s a ridiculous feature of modern life that these (what used to be called) “labor-saving devices” may be actually causing more helplessness than enabling usefulness.
I have no solutions to this mishegas – what can one person do against a vast cultural tide anyway? – but I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. Perhaps that Butler fellow had it right all along. Who’s with me?