NOT in the slow lane, YET
The blog is about living life after 70 with joy, resilience, and purpose. NOT in the slow lane, YET is a source of positive, helpful advice encouraging people to set and achieve goals and find joy in life. The blog will cover personal experiences and thoughts and concerns. Topics of blogs will be health, retirement, fashion, travel, and living in continuing care retirement communities. The blogs will be short and appear at least once a month on my website www.nadineblock.com or by email if you choose. Come walk with me.
Turn a grumpy rant into a smile!
Someone wrote to my blog NOT in the slow lane YET that I viewed the world through rose-colored glasses. I need to clear up that misunderstanding. Sometimes I am a crabby senior citizen who thinks the world is going to hell. Grrrrr.
This little note written by an unknown source appeared in my email. I threw my arm in the air and fist pumped, “You tell em girl!”
Not only does my grocery store have me bag my groceries in personal shopping bags (or get charged for paper ones), but the cashier no longer handles cash. I need to pull cash from a clear plastic bag in my purse (I know that sounds a little looney, but bills are easier to see than in a wallet), and I put it in an elaborate change apparatus. After my purchase, it proceeds to cough out bills and coins, some falling to the floor where I retrieve them while anticipating a scream from my sciatic nerve.
Years ago, I forecast that the decline of service would escalate. I think it began when we started pumping our own gas. In my childhood, an attendant pumped gas. In rich communities, attendants wore snappy uniforms. In poor communities, they crawled out from under cars they were working on to do the gas pumping duties.
Attendants not only pumped gas but checked oil and tire pressures and washed car windows.
Herb Timms invented the system in 1964 that allowed an attendant in the store to activate the gas pumps without leaving the store. It was a cost-saving device. Fewer people needed to be hired. It took a while to catch on because most states had fire codes that did not allow self-service and because it was costly to implement.
Forty-eight states changed their fire codes to allow for individuals to pump their own gas by the early l980’s. The devices were not cheap: they cost $10,000. It took years to get the system widely available.
When she was in her nineties (about 2010), my mother had a gas station in her small town of Abbotsford Wisconsin she called “Widows’ Gas Station” where an attendant pumped gas, checked tires and washed windows. It survived until that time because the device was costly and there were quite a few widows in town who bought their gas.
What is in our future? A nursing home staffed by robots? An ATM Pharmacy? A phlebotomist kiosk for blood tests? List future machines that might take over for people. Draw a picture like I did. It might make you smile.
“A Brief History of Self-Serve Gas Stations” By Petroleum Service Company on Jan 22, 2018
Go from GRRRRR to GRIN. Laugh more!
“Stress relief from laughter? It’s no joke,” Mayo Clinic