Day 3: Snail mail vs. email

Between You, Me and the Lamp Post

Day 3: Snail mail vs. email

Back in the day when I was young (gosh that’s ancient history) people talked about the good old days and I wondered what was so good about them. These days I find myself thinking the same thing ... ah, the good old days.

Take mail for instance. With the arrival of email and chat regular mail has somewhat become obsolete.

Who remembers waiting for the mailman? On the street where I grew up the mailman usually arrived around 11:00 a.m. Through snow, wind, rain or shine, he pushed his bicycle from house to house with a sack full of mail. When he approached our house, I waited if he would stop by our mailbox and when he did I would rush to the box to see what we’d received.

Envelopes with window were for my parents, but occasionally there would be a letter for me. Oh, the excitement of it.

Nowadays I rarely receive a real letter anymore, instead, I receive emails. And while it’s nice that mail is instant with no chance of anything getting lost, I somehow miss the old-fashioned way. 

I remember getting a block of paper and a pen, sitting down at the dining room table and starting a letter to one of my friends. The smell of the paper, the pen gliding across its smooth surface ... it was a relaxing and satisfying task. Then it was waiting for a reply, which could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

Another thing of the past is the excitement of the phone. Back in the day, businesses and shops had phones, but regular people ... no, hardly anyone had one. When phones became popular our neighbors started applying for such an apparatus and had to wait months for a phone line to be installed. We got our phone within a matter of weeks, but only because my brother was diagnosed with diabetes. Medical reasons pushed an applicant to the top of the waiting list. That and my boyfriend at the time worked for the phone company.

Once the phone was installed, heaven help us when it rang. It was such a momentous occasion that we quite literally fell over ourselves to answer it. The phone rang … my goodness, everyone stopped what they were doing and rushed to be the first one to get to it. Nobody ever called for me, because my friends didn’t have a phone, but that didn’t stop me from joining the race.

These days just about everyone has a cellphone, often ignores a call and prefers to let it go to voicemail. How times have changed.

Ending a call has also changed. Who remembers slamming the phone down when displeased with a certain caller? I have slammed the phone down more than once. These days, I merely jab at the ‘End’ button.

Then there is the car. These days just about all cars have an automatic transmission, but in my day cars were manual. Part of the fun of driving is shifting gears, pushing it into first, throwing it into fourth. What fun is there is merely pushing a pedal?

Then again, with modern cars parking certainly has improved. From what I understand, some cars park themselves.  Oh, how I struggled with reversed parking when I first learned how to drive! I failed my drivers' exam twice because during the reversed parking segment I kept knocking down the pylons.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was super nervous and after another pylon went flying I just about lost it.

“I can do this,” I told the examiner. “I really can but you’re making me nervous.”

“Alright,” he said, “you practice a bit and I’ll go get a cup of coffee.”

While he was gone I did the reverse parking three times and three times it worked like a charm. When the examiner came back, he marked my exam paper as ‘passed’.

“But you don’t know whether I can do it or not?” I told him.

“Oh yes I do,” he said. “I’ve been watching you from the coffee shop. You’re good to go.”

When I think of things in my good old days, I wonder what this generation will look back on when they recall their good old days. Will people in due time learn how to fly?