When I can’t sit down at a desk, I find I can’t effectively
use my laptop because I am addicted to using a mouse. The trackpad
is just too frustrating. I need that mouse. An age thing?
Also I have all my books on my iPad.
I have them on my laptop and my iPhone, but it’s easier to just yank out
the iPad and the iPhone is frustratingly small to read a whole book page on.
However, my iPad is an old one and it just doesn’t have the
power and apps are often not good
substitutes for real software. Well, sometimes they’re not … So when I’m doing my air travel , getting in my Sky Miles, about half of my
baggage is now electronic toys.
My iPhone is my lifeline,
as I’m sure it is for most people today, and when I can’t get free wifi, I need
it to set up my own hotspot. I also see a number of people with their smartphones in one hand and their tablets on their knees. They’re thumbing something on the cell and
fingering something on the tablet – simultaneously.
I have also seen a good number of people without paper
boarding passes, using their smartphones with a bar code on the screen in place of a paper boarding pass.
What was life like before we got so plugged in? Well … I don’t
think it matters since we’re not ever going to go backwards until after, maybe,
Armageddon. The big apocalypse. I am old enough to know what it was like and
one thing it was like, was boring as snot.
We are told the art
of reading is disappearing. As I sit
here in one of the largest airports in the USA and I do a quick inventory of
what has to be several, maybe five hundred people, sitting right around me – at
least half are reading paper books (including youngsters) and forty percent of
the others are reading from e-tablets.
That means 90% of this crowd are reading. There are at least fifteen TVs in this area
(Concourse B – Gates 15 to 30) and nobody
is even looking at them.
The other ten percent of this crowd are talking on cell
phones or punching in some kind of text.
Right here I see only one other laptop being used.
It would seem when Americans fly, they read. The airlines don’t bother to put movies on
flights anymore.
I also notice that the preponderance of overweight
individuals somehow seems to be far less prevalent at airports. I would estimate the majority of people I
have seen so far today on this trip are not
terribly fat. When I go to the
SuperMarts, Woah! The human flesh on the hoof is staggering. Makes me almost embarrassed to be American.
I guess they don’t fly much – the fatties. I mean, by and large, Americans are still
quite large as a rule, but not quite
so massively obese as we are led to believe.
At least not in the sky on airplanes.
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