Ok, it's been over 10 days after my last post (shame on me) and Halloween is just around the corner. Both events have no connection or relevance whatsoever, but I though I should point them out.

I was making a phone call and I was dialing the numbers faster than I could hear the tones, so while I had finished dialing I kept listening to the tones for a couple of seconds thinking that the phone was too slow... when I suddenly realized how intolerant we've become of technology.

Remember when you had to dial an actual disc, and wait for the disc to go back to the original position to dial the next number? Zero was the worst  since you had to wait for it to go the whole way around.

Same thing with the TV sets, here in Mexico you turned on a "regulator" connected to the TV to avoid short circuits blowing a fuse on the set, and then you had to listen to the show for a whole minute before you could see an actual image (the bulbs were heating up...) Or even computers: my brother had a Vic-20 and later on a Commodore-64, the first one recorded data on cassettes (actual audio cassettes, the ones you used to hear on your tape deck before burnable CD's and MP3's), and the second one had large, black floppy discs. On both counts, there were programs that took over 10 minutes to load before you could start using them.

I'm telling you this because last week I was giving a conference on the relationship between comic books and movies, and someone from the audience criticized DVD additional materials. He was right, of course, they sometimes fill these up with a load of garbage just to make them "collectable" and charge more, but on the other hand I was thinking that our tolerance towards technology is becoming smaller as we grow accustomed to fast, quick, easy acceess to anything.

Access is good, but the downside is that some people get addicted to the easy way out instead of taking advantage of what they have at the grasp of their fingers. We just fired a girl and one of the final reasons was that instead of giving us a report of what she learnt at the media agency during one of her training days, she got an article from the internet and pasted part of it on a mail as if it were her own. While watching an old Kolchak TV show (the one about the reporter that hunts monsters) I saw him getting a bunch of books from the library to find out a fact about witchcraft that you could now google in 5 minutes (tops) on your computer. If you have such easy access to information, shouldn't you strive to deliver richer, more complete and competent reports? Instead we have kids cheating and learning nothing in the process, because they're too "busy" (when I taught at college I got homeworks literally taken out of the internet, where you don't even have to re-write them, so my guess is they didn't even read what they were delivering in most of the cases).

Again, it's my inner grumpy-old-man talking, but I found an upside in all this: we are currently looking for a person to fill the aforementioned position left by the girl we just fired, and it turns out even though we are receiving over a hundred curriculae, really capable, professional, commited people are very hard to find; so having everybody getting lazy becomes a great opportunity for those truly serious about their professional life. Standing out is easier nowadays because true dedication has become scarce. Take advantage of it!

Have a great week.