Day 3883

I made an appointment to get my car safety inspected today. I didn't used to need an appointment for this sort of thing. I just drove up to the dealership and was in and out in a few minutes. A lot has changed. I used to have the same service adviser for five or six years at a time. Everyone knew me and was familiar with my car. Now staff turnover is much higher and there seems to be an entirely new crew every time I visit the dealership. The dealership seems to have replaced people with technology. Any time I contact these guys, I immediately start receiving a barrage of text messages, e-mails, and reminders on my Apple calendar. As soon as I finish with my appointment tomorrow, I will get multiple requests to take a survey. Employees seem desperate to get good marks on these surveys. Some have specifically asked me to give them high satisfaction scores because their salary or bonus depends on it. Oddly, there is never a question on these surveys that allows me to tell the dealership how much I hate surveys.

Changes like these are happening in every industry. It would be so much nicer if companies would just forget the technology and hire more people. Back in the day when there were lots of employees, the phones were answered on the first ring. You didn't need online surveys to tell you what was going on. Companies knew their customers. There used to be so many companies where someone knew me personally. They didn't need a survey to know what I liked or needed. It didn't matter whether it was a car dealer, a clothing store, or a camera shop, the sales people who waited on me looked at their jobs as a career. I often dealt with the same people for decades. It's hard to even explain how different things used to be to younger people. They don't believe me when I tell them that life was better with less technology. I guess you had to be there.

We got another early start this morning. There were still stars in the sky when we left the house, but I've learned not to look up too often while I'm walking Dawn. She has not learned to heal and is constantly crisscrossing from my left side to my right. She also speeds up and slows down rather abruptly. If I'm not watching her carefully, it's easy to trip over her. I also need to make sure that she stays well out of the way of bicycles and other dogs we encounter while walking. Maybe she'll learn to heal one of these days, but until then I can't be daydreaming and looking up at the stars.

I still have a hard time dealing with how much the temperature changes on an average August day. Sometimes there is a forty degree difference between the pre-dawn hours when we take our walks and late afternoons when things are hottest. Mornings are pleasant. Afternoons are torture. I still do both walks because there isn't much else to do, but I definitely prefer pre-dawn mornings.

I got some embroidered mission patches from the Mars 2020 and DM-2 missions in the mail today. I always made sure to get a mission patch for every launch that I attended. It was nice to have something tangible to remember. Now I've started collecting these patches from launches I haven't been to at all. Yikes. This is getting dangerously close to being a collector again. I guess it's a harmless activity. The patches are small and don't take up much space.

I hope they don't keep me waiting around at the dealership forever tomorrow. A safety inspection shouldn't take any longer than fifteen minutes. Maybe I'll tell them that if they can get me in and out in a hurry, I'll take their silly survey.

Hannah is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 3822

It seems like you can't do anything these days without being asked to take a survey. You go to the doctor. The next day you get an e-mail asking you to take a survey. You take your car in for an oil change. You are asked to take a survey. You stay in a hotel or rent a car. Yep. More surveys. You can't even call someone on the phone without being asked to take a short survey at the end of the call. It seems like employees are being evaluated based on survey results. Sometime they will practically beg you to give them a ten because an upcoming raise or promotion depends on good results. When did this start happening? I've had plenty of performance reviews during my career, but my fate never depended on a survey. I used to fill out some of these surveys but I try to ignore them now. There are always lots of questions about how well you like the company's service. There never seems to be any questions about how irritating you found the survey.

So many things about modern life are irritating. The future didn't end up being like the Jetsons after all. I certainly didn't expect a double header of plagues and riots in 2020. I didn't expect a concerted effort to erase history either. There is something troubling about pulling down statues and condemning classic films like Gone with the Wind. It seems a little too much like Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution to me. You realize quickly that popular favorites like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Married with Children, and even Sienfeld would never survive in a world where a children's cartoon like Paw Patrol is being castigated.

Isn't anyone familiar with history anymore? History repeats itself over and over again. The Weather Underground led directly to the Law and Order years of the Nixon administration. Do you want that again? The pendulum always swings one way and then the tide turns and it swings the other way. It's a shame that people in both political parties seem willing to let a city like Seattle self destruct because they think it will help them politically. Republicans are eager to use footage of the chaos on Capitol Hill in campaign ads to depict a world controlled by Democrats. Democrats are just as eager for Trump to bring in the tanks so they can do their own campaign ads depicting him as a ruthless dictator.

It's a shame that Americans seem to need an enemy. We were at our best during World War II. The country prospered and the middle class grew during the Cold War when most people seemed to agree that The Soviet Union must be defeated. Little wars in Vietnam and the Middle East never seemed to do the trick. Without an external enemy, we just fight with each other. I think the Chinese are laughing at us now. They probably look at what's going on over here and think "Game over. We've got this."

I just wish that things would stay peaceful for another twenty years. After I'm gone, you guys can do whatever you want. I kind of liked it when everything was locked down. The roads were quiet and people just concentrated on staying alive. I heard birds when I woke up instead of airplanes. Now that things are slowly rumbling back to life, you realize that we humans have learned nothing. We are just as determined to make a mess of things as we ever were.

Willa is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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