When Everything Had to Wait

By Mark Morgan

I got to thinking the other day about how much time we used to spend waiting.

Not waiting in some long line at the courthouse or sitting in a doctor's office wondering why they gave you a 10 o'clock appointment when they apparently had no intention of seeing you before noon.

I'm talking about the little kind of waiting that used to be part of everyday life.

Take music.

There was a time when I'd walk into a store and flip through a stack of 45 records, one at a time. You didn't have every song ever recorded sitting in your pocket. You looked through those records until you found the one you wanted.

And when you found it, you bought it.

You took it home, pulled it out of that little paper sleeve, put it on the record player, and dropped the needle.

If you wanted to hear it again, you got up and played it again.

Today, I can think of a song I haven't heard in forty years, pull out my phone, and be listening to it before I can remember where I left my reading glasses.

Then there was money.

I remember when leaving the house meant checking your wallet to see if you had enough cash.

If you had twenty dollars, you knew you had twenty dollars.

There wasn't much confusion about it.

You could look right there in your wallet and see exactly how good—or how bad—your financial situation was.

Today, one little plastic card will buy your groceries, fill up your gas tank, and get you a cup of coffee without a dollar bill ever changing hands.

You don't even have to carry the card anymore.

Now your phone can spend your money for you.

That's progress, I suppose.

Maybe a little too much progress if you ask my bank account.

And then there was the six o'clock news.

If you wanted to know what happened in the world that day, you waited.

At six o'clock, somebody turned on the television, and there it was.

The news.

And if you wanted to know whether it was going to rain tomorrow, you waited for the weatherman.

You didn't have a radar map in your pocket showing you a storm cloud moving across the county one minute at a time.

You watched the weather forecast, made your best guess, and went about your business.

Sometimes the weatherman got it right.

Sometimes you got wet.

Today, before I even get out of my chair, I can check the news, look at the radar, listen to an old song, buy something I don't need, and spend money I can't see.

All on the same little phone.

And I have to admit, that's pretty amazing.

I wouldn't necessarily want to give all of it back.

But every now and then, I wonder about something.

Back when we had to wait for the song, wait for the news, wait for the weather, and carry the money we actually had, maybe we learned a little patience without realizing it.

We couldn't have everything the second we wanted it.

And somehow, we survived.

Maybe that's the funny thing about progress.

We've gotten mighty good at saving time.

I'm just not sure we've figured out what to do with all the time we saved.