OXFORD — Life is good, and I really shouldn’t be complaining.
My wife and I are in good health, considering our advancing years, and we’re enjoying modern conveniences we didn’t even dream about when we got married almost 60 years ago.
As Dr. J.B. Fowler, who was the pastor of McComb’s First Baptist Church back in the 1970s, used to pray: We give the Lord thanks that “things are as well with us as they are.”
Still there are life’s little irritations, some of them brought on by the very technology that makes the living easy these days.
Here are a few that come to mind:
• Service providers who inform customers who pay their monthly bills with an automatic bank draft that they will no longer provide a paper bill in the mail and give this as an excuse: “We are doing this as an effort to help the environment by reducing paper waste.”
What they are doing is reducing postal and clerical expense and putting the onus on loyal customers to have to go to the trouble of logging on to the internet to check their monthly bills to make sure they haven’t been hit with a rate increase or a billing mistake.
Paper, which can be recycled and also derives from trees — of which there are plenty on Mississippi tree farms — isn’t a big culprit in harming the environment. So don‘t try to tell me that’s the reason you aren’t sending bills.
Anyway, we own some timber. I wouldn’t mind seeing the prices go up, and if more paper helps it, I want a paper bill.
• Those same kind of service providers who, when you have a problem with whatever they are providing, direct you to a phone number to reach help if you aren’t able to solve the problem by going to their website.
• When you call the number, you are welcomed by a friendly but recorded voice that directs you to punch a number on your telephone key pad corresponding to your problem or question, then you are transferred to a recording saying “all our agents are busy” and one will be with you shortly.
Shortly can turn into half an hour or more, if you’re patient enough to hold on that long. All the while you are bombarded with music with intermittent recorded messages of how much they appreciate your business or how great their service is.
• The voice of that guy who hawks a certain anti-snoring device in commercials on news and sports channels on cable television and SiriusXM radio. Listening to him repeatedly is worse than hearing someone snore, which may be the subliminal purpose of using such a voice in the commercial.
As we used to say in the country, “He ain’t from around here.”
• Motorists who block the passing lane on a highway by tooling along at the same speed of a car in the right-hand lane. Eighteen-wheelers are notorious at this, but most of them have an excuse as it sometimes takes a mile or so for one to pass the other.
• People who can still be seen texting while driving, or sometimes holding up traffic at a signal light, although the practice is illegal and dangerous.
• Repeated mail and telephone messages from some outfit warning this is your last chance to extend the warranty on your aging automobile, although you have repeatedly told the callers you didn’t want it and to take you off the list. Saving the environment by reducing paper apparently doesn’t apply to these people or to others who want to sign you up for another credit card.
• And, finally, if you’re reading this and see a typo or two, I’ll take the blame. But when I first became a reporter, we had proofreaders, whose job it was to catch such mistakes by reading paper proofs of the articles that were to go into the newspaper.
Nowadays, busy editors read the articles on a computer, which has a spell-checking software that doesn’t know a “two” from a “too” or a “to.”
The proofreader has gone the way of the human switchboard operator, who could direct your call to a real person in a reasonable amount of time.
I miss them both.
• Charles M. Dunagin is the retired editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb. He lives in Oxford.
