ELECTRONIC FORMS
I'm at the airport, through TSA (Thousands Standing Around), with my boarding passes waiting to go to Zurich, Switzerland to speak at the Soil to Soul Symposium on Saturday.
I'm contemplating the comments from the technology post, waiting to fly international with no smart phone. I don't know if my hotspot will work--I have a new one, so this is the first international trial for it.
The comment that struck me most was the one about electronic forms. Wow, did that hit home. And this international conference, full of electronic releases, agreements, and electronic presentation requests (I don't have a single electronic presentation) is a perfect example of the consternation I experience in this space.
I get tons of electronic forms but can never figure out how to fill them out. The worst ones are the ones with required fields that won't let you proceed unless you fill out that blank. I have no idea how to send a picture on my laptop, so if it wants a headshot, that stops me cold. I might spend half an hour struggling through the boxes only to get stopped by something like that. I can't keep going and can't back up.
About 1 in 10 that asks me to sign something actually has a way for me to figure out how to do it. Nothing about these things is intuitive. You have to think like a geek. If you think like a cow or chicken, you're out of luck.
Fortunately I have some smart people around me who know how to do these things, but every time I have to push this off on someone else: "can you sign this for me?" or "can you send a picture to these people?" I'm reminded how obsolete I'm becoming. l have no idea what this is doing to my mental and emotional health and therefore the important human need to feel relevant and needed.
The electronic highway seems to be going at supersonic speed and I want to live out my days in a mechanical car, thank you very much. We don't even have phone books anymore. My little 2000 Ford Ranger is getting a leaky tailpipe fixed at a muffler shop. How do I call them to see how things are going? I have to turn on the computer, pull up Safari, type in the name of the business, pull up the website, and hopefully find a phone number. More and more businesses don't even put their phone number on the website. Now what?
Oh, you're supposed to have an app. On your smart phone. That you purchased after standing in line for an hour at the phone geek store waiting to talk to someone whose every third word is something you've never heard before. They talk in text abbreviations and techno-speak jargon.
In the world I love, cows always moo. The same way. Chickens always cluck. The same way. The wood stove always burns. The same way. The pear tree always produces pears. They look the same every year. Perhaps the tension I feel is because I embrace and immerse--happily--in so much that stays the same.
Hopefully my frustration with being increasingly anachronistic will be ameliorated by the days I get to enjoy the cows, pigs, chickens, trees, and pastures of a piece of land I've devoted my life to nurturing. Perhaps that will keep me sane and mentally sharp.
That said, I do love email. I'm not opposed to technology. I find some extremely helpful but a lot of it unnecessarily complicated. How many hours a year do I spend trying to figure out how to navigate this electronic superhighway? Just because I like having a car I don't yearn to have the most gadgetized car. Just because I like email doesn't mean everything in life has to go electronic. I view email like a letter. I've had people tell me "you write emails like it's an old-fashioned letter." Yes, that's right. And I type really fast.
Do you ever wish we could go back to paper agreements and forms?