Prompt A

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, and most of the time it does. We can do things with technology today that people never dreamed of 100 years ago. Corresponding by mail is a thing of the past. I haven’t sent a personal letter for over a decade. There are so many other ways of keeping in touch with people now. If I don’t want to call someone, I can text them. I could get on facebook and see what is going on in their lives, and write a note on their wall, or send them an email. My entire family is on facebook. A lot of my extended family have facebook accounts as well, including my grandmother. It really does make staying in touch a lot easier. I don’t even have to talk to people anymore, I can just read their blog and I know what’s new and exciting in their lives.
At work, we have several ways of communicating internally and externally. Internally, we have email, phone, and even instant messaging. Instant messenger comes in handy because it can also show another employee’s status as away or busy. A large portion of my external communication, communication with our clients, happens by email. About a year ago, our IT Director installed e-fax, so even my faxes happen by email. We scan documents and email them to clients to be signed if need be. We don’t have any file cabinets, every document we need record gets scanned and is sent to our electronic filing system. It really makes me wonder how much slower this company used to function years and years ago without all the way technology has simplified everything.
Even though technology has made our lives so much easier, we still manage to find plenty of negative in it. Oh, it is there. Because we rely so heavily on our network at work, when the network is down, we can’t get much done. That becomes a huge handicap. If we didn’t do 90% of our jobs on our computers, our jobs would get done slower, but there would never be any outages.
I believe cell phones are one of the biggest frustrations in our society. It seems no matter where you go, someone is on a cell phone. Cell phones ring at church no matter how inappropriate it may be. Cell phones ring at the movies, at dinner, or at work. And the ring tones usually aren’t subtle. A guy I work with has a ring tone that sounds like an industrial alarm. The first time I heard it, I thought there was some sort of drill. Now, it is just annoying. I have heard several people say they hate cell phones, and yet they carry one. I have been so spoiled by having one, I am not sure how I would live my life without one. It is so nice to be able to text my husband while I am at work.
Really we are spoiled as a generation, and the upcoming generations will be worse. My 8 year old niece spends a lot of time on the computer. When I was 8, we had a commodore computer and played pac man on it. We had computer class at school, but very little was actually done by computer. 8 year olds all over have cell phones! What in the world does an 8 year old need a cell phone for? We are just so used to having these things that we forget maybe our children don’t need them. We survived as kids without them, and our parents survived for decades without all the things we take for granted today.
612 words

*I'm pretty sure I should have narrow this down to one part of technology...once I got writing I just kept on going.