What A World

I took the day off Sunday, didn’t have much to share, and started Monday off with a trip to the Ford dealership to have the Escape serviced. They have a nice, roomy waiting room with Newsmax on the TV at a reasonably low level and that would have been fine. Except for the clueless dude with the cell phone who hasn’t ever heard of earbuds. How flipping annoying. How rude. How clueless to one’s surroundings can you get?

The days of having the time flash by in a waiting room while you chat with people who are also waiting for their vehicles to be serviced are dead and gone it seems. I guarantee you, if I had smiled and tried to speak to the dude with his nose in the cell phone, I would not have had a pleasant response. I’ve tried multiple times in the past (other people, other places) and finally gave it up. Those folks don’t want to be bothered by real people or have actual conversations to pass the time and discuss news and current events.

And, yes, I know that sometimes people are conducting business. That’s fine. But not everyone around you wants to hear your private phone conversations or listen to the crappy music that you love.

The time has come that Brad and I will have to upgrade to smart phones since most carriers are going to drop 911 service on older 3g phones after the first of the year. We knew it was coming and now we get to decide what is our best option. I’ll still only be using mine for making calls away from home to stay in touch with family while I’m out and about. There might be a couple of apps that would benefit me, no doubt. I have a good laptop for online shopping and such and intend to keep my life simplified that way as much as possible. My lifestyle doesn’t require a lot of ‘on the go’ technology like a lot of folks these days and I’m fine with that.

The next time I need to have the SUV serviced I’ll just have Brad follow me and we’ll drop it off and come back and pick it up later. We could go to lunch or run errands and get it on the way home and save a lot of frustration.

I guess that’s what we get, living out in a quiet rural area for 46 years. Our neighbors are there if we need them or they need us, but we aren’t elbow to elbow and don’t hear one another coming and going very often. When people come out to our house for the first time, folks who live in town, they stop and look around, mouths open in shock at the quiet or the sound of the wind in the big pine tree. For a short time they are peaceful and happy and enjoy being here. But there probably isn’t one in a hundred who would actually live out like we do if they had the chance.

The world likes noise and news blaring 24/7 everywhere people go: Restaurants with music blaring so loud you can’t carry on a conversation with someone from across a table or booth; Stores where you can’t shop without different music blaring from one part of the store to another, loud, irritating and in your face, one style of music competing with the other. It’s nuts. How anyone can enjoy shopping in such conditions is beyond me. I shop for clothing and household items online these days for that very reason. I go online and do my grocery shopping and pull up at the store and someone loads it in the back of the SUV for me.

I used to enjoy shopping. We had a great mall when I was in school and when my friends and I started driving we would meet at the mall and go to the cinema and go to the music store or the book store and hang out for hours. That mall had to be demolished decades ago due to black mold. Another mall was built north of the old one on the same highway but it’s almost deserted. It smells musty. There aren’t a dozen stores open where over fifty once were.

So, I’ll continue to give thanks for the blessings we have and praise God we don’t have to live inside the city limits. One or the other of us would have been in jail by now…