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We have witnessed awesome technological advances over the last few years but they have not necessarily made our lives simpler. Once, upon arriving at the office, we drank our early morning cup of coffee and then checked the post. The secretary brought in a pile of neatly opened envelopes (unless marked private and confidential) and all we had to do was to sort them into piles. Junk; answer straight away; ignore; pass the buck; or leave pending, hoping that the problem would just fade away. No one had more than one phone line. Today it’s all different. In addition to the above I have to check my e-mail, both office and private, read the faxes and deal with SMSs in between answering three stationary and two mobile phones (business and private).
It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t get such a deluge of spam every day; 90% of my e-mails are junk. I could have bought enough fake Viagra to reclaim the Sahara Desert by now! In order to survive, I never open e-mail from an unknown source or from those friends and colleagues who have nothing to do except send me stupid jokes. However, rarely, some of the nonsense has a more serious side and is actually thought-provoking. I chose to share such a rarity with you. In part 2, I intend to link it with recently published research on how cancer patients waste so much of their time when receiving treatment.
The email that I found so though-provoking is George Carlin’s Views on Aging. It goes like this.
“Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we’re kids? If you’re less than 10 years old, you’re so excited about aging that you think in fractions. ‘I’m four and a half! (never 36
