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Remember waiting six to eight weeks for delivery? And the weeks you invested in eating enough cereal that you didn't like to collect the required number of box tops?
Now all a kid has to do is pop open Amazon or some other shopping link and the prize that used to come in the mail will be delivered to your front door tomorrow.
What we've gained in speed we've lost in patience.
When I was a kid, we had to snap the TV on five minutes before the show started. The TV needed a couple minutes to warm up before we could begin to adjust the vertical and horizontal holds.
We were forced to wait a whole week for the next episode. If we missed it, it was gone. Our only hope was that the episode would air again during summer reruns. Or that your playground pals could fill you in the next day at school.
Now if the show we want to binge watch on our streaming service buffers for 10 seconds, we yell at the screen, "What is taking so long?" And we pay the premium price because who has 120 seconds to sit through commercials? Get on with it!
Patience.
When it took the Pony Express about 10 days to dash mail the 2,000 miles from Missouri to the West Coast, a guy didn't start pacing the floors until a good eight or nine days.
Before the speedy delivery of the Pony Express, a wait of four months for anything was no time at all.
Now, if it takes more than 15 seconds for the kid at the drive-through window to build your burger, you're ready to demand his manager.
And hey, if it takes more than 30 seconds for a buddy to respond to a text message, you need to hurry up and find a new friend.
Give me patience and give it to me now!
According to a story on the radio -- before I punched up another station -- we have four seconds of patience.
That's how long we're willing to wait for a website to load. If it hasn't popped up within four seconds, we're already clicking over to another site.
This means that I possess unusual patience. I have been known to wait as long as six, even seven seconds before throwing the mouse across the room and stomping away from the screen.
An article I started reading about patience -- I didn't have time to finish it -- listed these statistics:
* More than half of callers hang up on customer service if left on hold for one to eight minutes. (If my call is so "important to us," why don't you stop playing that music or whatever you call that droning, kill the recording imploring me to "please stay on the line" and TALK TO ME! Now!)
* More than two-thirds of customers will walk away if the wait in line is more than 15 minutes. (Fifteen minutes is excessively patient. Most of us have abandoned the shopping cart within four minutes, melting ice cream and all.)
* We're ready to explode within 18 seconds of searching unsuccessfully for a misplaced item. (Want to destroy your enemy? Move the ketchup bottle down one shelf in his refrigerator and wait 18 seconds.)
In the first article that popped up in a Google search (I wonder whatever happened to that set of encyclopedias we had when I was a kid), Abby Medcalf, PhD, wrote, "In a world of instant gratification, patience is in low demand."
Fortunately, Dr. Medcalf's article appeared about 0.8 seconds after I clicked on the link, so I read a good 30 or 45 seconds of it before clicking ahead to the next one. Because I'm a patient man. I can hold out for nearly double the typical four seconds of patience.
Zap Burt your tale of patience at burton.w.cole@gmail.com. He'll read it when he has four seconds to spare.