Pay bills at the post office? Not many people did that before. We used these things called "Mailboxes," and sometimes I still do. "Go to the bank to conduct your business." In the sense of entering a vast temple of money were people queue up to deal with tellers, not so much. I used to hate going to the bank, because I always expet the teller to frown, say "you have an account, you said? I'm not showing anything." But I like wandering down to the Credit Union, depositing a check, and maybe picking up a free pen. This is now the equivalent of going to the General Store and shooting the breeze for an hour with three coots sitting around a cast-iron furnace, I guess.
#33 Pay by paper check. No one does that anymore! The Boy Scouts come around selling boxes of grapefruit you neither want nor need but buy anyway, you just give them plastic and they memorize the number. Right.
#34 Make a photo album. Nonsense. Plenty of people make scrapbooks, and as long as there are Moms there will be scrapbooks. I make a Shutterfly book of family pictures at the end of ever year, because people around the house are more likely to look at it. Otherwise they have to go to the computer and find the pictures, or wait for the TV screensaver to kick in and load the TRIP folder on the network. This is the golden age of democratized photography, and yes, most of it is dreck, but the more pictures you have, the less likely you are to look at them.
I just made that up, but it's probably backed up by a study somewhere.
Here's the one that stuck out: "Watch videos. DVD and VCRs." If that's the case, then there shouldn't be a line at the Redbox on Friday, with everyone starting to fume because the person at the machine is taking ten minutes to decide which movie to rent. Yes, lots of people get their content streamed; I do. A lot of people who sniffed at DVDs are watching a pirated copy. But DVDs and VCRs are not in the same category, for one thing. A VCR is just a low-capacity DVR. A Blu-Ray is superior to most streaming content on a good TV. There's no shame in watching a disc. It's not the equivalent of blinking-12:00 on your microwave.
And so on. There's an underlying message: physical media are history. Not entirely true, but we're on the way. I don't miss phone books, and I don't miss paper address books, and the tedium of paying bills with paper and pen is nothing anyone misses, unless you liked to write angry messages on the NOTES line. But it reminds you of the variety of objects with which we interacted on a regular basis - heavy Yellow Pages, freshly printed newspapers, single sheets chosen for a love note, the serendipitous wonders of an encyclopedia and the way it made the world seem comfortingly comprehensible just by arranging All Things in alphabetical order.
