Technology Tek over...

Writers block seems to be catching the blog community but I am hitting at it. I went to the tyre shop yesterday to have a valve on one tyre replaced. The younger of the two tyre repairers was complaining that light had been off for a while and he was unable to do any jobs. He said he had to turn many people away because none of his hi tech machines would work. I am assuming that the majority of his work was repairing flats since their were only a limited number of new tyres around. The older gentleman was laughing him to scorn and telling him that him born when is pure lazy people deh bout. Cuz when him did learn tyre trade is iron and flat pipe that had to be used to change tyre. The same sentiment tranverses into our daily lives. 21 years ago when I joined my current employ, there were no PC's around. The mainframe was accessed by only the staff in the data processing unit and that was done by punch cards and centralized key entry points. There were rows of desks in each department with typewriter to be used by the stenographer. Memos were done by hand and typed if going to a senior officer. In stark contrast is the office of today. Almost every desk has a PC that is networked to the main servers and each other. Mail is by email. memos are typed by the individual officers and are either emailed or printed depending on requirement. Stenographers are a dying (dead) profession. What has struck me though is not so much the progress that we have made but rather the lack of ingenuity and hindsight that has arisen as a result of this progress. If the PC does not work for some reason, work ceases. We cannot remember how to write a memo by hand or a receipt if the POS system runs out of paper. These were things that were done for many years before "technology was invented". I had to remind a sales clerk recently that in the absence of a functioning credit card authorization system, rather than turn the customers away, she could call through the transactions for credit approval. "Bing!!!" it suddenly occurs to her that that was what used to happen just 3 years ago. Luckily I was a customer and not her employer, (although her employer couldn't have been much better since she didn't think of that solution either). Is it a case of forward forever, backwards never? Or just a case of "how easily we forget where we came from". Maybe it is for this reason that our children cannot grasp our language since they are no longer exposed to books and what it means to read and assess situations for themselves. If you want them to learn, put it on a PS2, Game Cube, or some other techno console or CD. This in addition to the other factors to which they are exposed on a daily basis (like my patois, (Jamaican patwah)) do not elevate my hopes for a bright future in Language Arts at all. Hemmingway asked "For whom the Bell Tolls?" I say for English Language and all things non techno savy. Later guys.