The Age of Dependency

Yesterday, the power went out at Newark airport for a couple of hours. The world shut down. Our reliance on electronics is making our society ever more infantile in its ability to handle shocks.

Here are just a few examples of what happened, and how people reacted.

• Passengers were trapped for three hours aboard planes that could not dock with electronically controlled docking platforms tied to an electronic scheduling program.
• Cash registers at coffee shops and airport bookstores shut down, not to mention coffe makers, refrigerators and lights.
• Automatic faucets in restrooms stopped working, as did automatic toilet flushers.
• Thousands of baffled travelers simply sat in the dark. Most talked frantically on their cellphones and smartphones until the batteries began to run out (the outage lasted about 3 hours).
• On the good news front, CNN and FOX stopped blasting their mean spirited half truths out on televisions all over the airport. Things got a lot quieter.
• Kindle dependent book readers lost access to their library. Pandora-based music lovers lost their normal 24/7 FEED of music to the brain. In other worlds, everything digital or electronic either ceased to exist, or enter into its rapid battery death phase.

And people wonder why I prefer automobiles with windows I can roll up or down by hand...