When Innovation Gets Taken For Granted.

What were new and exciting 5 years ago are so common today we for get how things used to be before these wonderful things entered our lives.
Mp3 players- When I got an 512k Ipod shuffle two years ago, one of my co-workers said,"But those only hold 10 CDs worth of music, right." Yes, ONLY, not that long ago we had to use CD players that only held ONE CD, and we were happy. But not too happy, we didn't want it to skip. You can choose to read those last two sentences in an old man voice if you'd like.

Cell Phones-I'm sure you've seen these Cingular commercials:

Some are funny, most are dumb, but they all forget one universal truth: When we use cell phones and we don't hear the other person talking, don't we assume that the call has been dropped first? Doesn't that happen ALL THE TIME? We forget the age of the beeper when that was the standard in mobile-type communication, and they were useless if there wasn't a land line phone nearby.
I was one of the last people I knew to get a cell phone, and I got mine 5 years ago. Even back then so many people had cell phones that when a customer would use the store's cordless land-line phone they'd ask, "where's the send button?" I think it's telling that I have to use the qualifier "land-line" to begin with.

The Internet- The technology has been for a while, the possibilities have been stretched to the point where all of the songs, movies and TV shows that were lost to time or grabby roommates or only found on 12th generation dubbed VHS cassettes. We're to the point were something like dial-up internet access seems as archaic as rubbing sticks together to make fire. Even phones themselves have broadband internet access. I once downloaded a song I owned because it was faster than going downstairs to get the CD from my car. I realized once how dependent I was recently when I was without the internet for a week and a half when I moved to Iowa. Once I was connected again I may as well have been in DC. Except I couldn't make it to the happy hour my friends were planning.
I hate Iowa.