Everything Changes

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Time to fasten your seat belts everyone because I'm about to go into another one of my old man rants. This one is about changes. Nothing lasts forever, everything changes. Okay, I get it. But when things do change in our daily life, why is it they get more complicated, they seldom get easier?

I'm not referring to major life changes, like getting married, or growing old or having children. My beef is with the smaller everyday things we have to deal with, like garbage pick-up. In the good old days each week we'd put our garbage can out at the curbside and (usually) the following day the garbage men would come by and empty the can. It generally was in the morning. Pretty simple.

Now we must separate our garbage into at least three different containers (recyclables, grass cuttings, and general waste) before putting them out to be picked-up. Three different garbage trucks then come by at three different times throughout the day to collect. You never know when they will be coming, the entire process can take all day long. Now the talk is that the city may add a fourth bin, one exclusively for composting.

It wouldn't surprise me if soon they require the recyclables to be divided into several specialized bins; one for glass, one for paper, one for metal, one for plastic. Then we'd have to schlep eight containers out to the curb every week and wait for eight separate garbage trucks to come by to collect. This process may take several days. How's that for progress? Take an easy thing and make it complicated.

And speaking of complicated, I'm old enough to remember when we had one telephone company for the whole country. When you needed a new telephone you called THE telephone company and the telephone man came to your house and installed a new phone. AT NO CHARGE. If you ever had a problem with the phone or with the wiring, a telephone man came and fixed it for you. AT NO CHARGE. There was nothing to decide, nothing to figure out, no installation fees, no bundles, no contracts. All you had to know was how many phones you wanted and in what color. Simple. Easy.

Now you have to shop around and decide which carrier to sign a contract with; what the extended payments will be; do you want to "bundle," or not? Land line or cell phone? Flip phone or iphone? If iPhone, what apps do you want? Do you want streaming services and if so, which ones? Texting or not? What kind of plan do you want? And for how long? Do you wish to pay all at once? Do you want to upgrade your phone or take the one that comes with the plan? How many G's do you need? See how much better things get when they change?

When you went to the doctor's office and had an exam, he told you what kind of medicine you should be taking if you needed a medicine. He told you the proper treatments you needed to have to treat a medical condition. If you needed to have blood drawn, he would have his nurse draw the blood and he would send it to a lab. The lab would send back the results to the doctor who would go over them with you. Simple.

Now drug companies advertise their drugs on television for every conceivable medical condition in the human body. The ads instruct you to "ask your doctor or health professional" if this is right for you. You see your doctor armed with a list of drug names that are unpronounceable unless you've gone to medical school and know Latin. You tell your doctor which ones you want based on the commercial you watched. He then sends you to a specialist to treat whatever the condition is that needs treating.

If you need to have blood drawn you must go to an outside lab. You can either make an appointment, if you can, through an automated menu on the phone or go on line. If you go on line you'll need to set up an account. To do that you must create a password and a code along with your I.D. Then you must schedule an appointment at one of the labs' "convenient locations." You choose the location of lab and make your appointment at the first available opening. OR you can simply walk-in to a lab without an appointment. If you do, you take your chances because they will not see you until all the other people who have made appointments are taken care of first. This could mean sitting in the waiting room for hours.

Then after you finally get your blood drawn you need to set up an appointment with the specialist to go over the results. Hopefully the specialist will share those results with your primary care doctor. Otherwise you will have to set up an appointment with him which means going through the robo-menu on the phone. Listen carefully as our menu options have changed. Please stay on the line, your call is important to us.

Are there any other changes that have become more complicated? Oh, you bet there are. And I'll tell you more next week. But please stay on the line, your readership is important to me.

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