Our family, like millions of others, is using the Internet more and more in our daily routine.  It has streamlined our lives, and we love “fast”.  But now that things are fast, we want them even faster. 

And we become impatient.

We use it for keeping up with old pals.  It used to take at least a couple of weeks for a letter to make the trip, get answered, get mailed back, and we would anxiously await the reply in our mailbox.  Now we can’t understand why it’s not answered by the next day.  We tap our feet.

Of course, it can work against us as well.  We also use it to send work to the home office, and vice versa.  And the home office doesn’t like to have to tap its feet.  In the old days, we could always say, “It’s snowing … I can’t make it in” or “I mailed it yesterday” and then get working on it.  But now, the home office wants more work, faster.  And there are just so many times you can use the excuse, “the server is down today”.  (NOTE TO HOME OFFICE:  MY SERVER REALLY WAS DOWN LAST WEEK!) 

We use it to look up stock prices and are upset because there is fifteen-minute delay in updates.  We tap our feet some more.  My goodness, to think we used to have to wait until the newspaper the next morning! 

Now we can even use it to pay bills.  In this case, faster is definitely not better.  For me, anyway.  They make it sound so great … you don’t have to stuff an envelope and lick a stamp!  The downside is that they suck that money out of your account faster than you can gasp for air.  Instead of a three-day float, we have a three-minute float.  For most females, that is not enough.

We use it a lot for research.  Fun research and not-so-fun stuff.  A lot of our children’s homework now includes internet research, and they are becoming web gurus at very young ages.  (Although the other night my son couldn’t find something on the internet and we found it in the encyclopedias.  That’s right, the old, musty, real-book-things in the living room that you have to flip the pages to read instead of scrolling.)  Sometimes it takes awhile to get from site to site.  We tap our feet some more.

It’s amazing, when you think about it, how quickly we are able to retrieve all this information.  In a matter of minutes, we can be at some website that answers just about any question. 

Yes, I said a matter of minutes.  That used to sound so fast.  Now we want faster, better, instantaneous results.  We don’t want to watch the little hourglass go round and round more than a couple of times.  We don’t want to tap our feet. 

Now we’re hearing about DSL.  You touch a button and the connection is almost that fast.  My college-aged son says that once you have it, you can never go back to the “slow” kind of connections we have now.

I just don’t know about that.  Faster research, yes.  Faster communication, yes. 

But now when I pay bills, they’ll suck my money out even faster.  They’d suck it out yesterday if they could. 

I’ll be going backwards faster than I did tomorrow. Or something like that.

I think I’d rather lick stamps and tap my feet.