Convenience. I hate it. Well not really. I will make use of the latest and greatest gadget, idea, or service to make my life easier. But I also realize that these conveniences have a dual edge that can cut both ways.
Take online banking for example. Convenient, fast, and relatively safe. Most businesses and utilities will accept online payments and will even automatically deduct the fees from your accounts without you even needing to think about it.
The scary truth however is that our accounts (whether you use online services or not) are not that safe. Major retailers have had card readers hacked, major online companies and even banks suffer through waves of attacks from thieves that probably aren’t located on the same continent. Our safety lies only in numbers and in not standing out as a potential victim.
So how does this all tie into the inconvenient and analog penny? So hated that some want to do away with it. Nothing directly, but as a symbol of a bygone system it is powerful.
A tangible representation of your wealth expressed in metal. No longer made entirely of copper as that metal is too precious to waste on a mere one cent piece. Perhaps that says something more about inflation than it does about the coin itself, but we will save that discussion for another time.
Once upon a time you had to strap on a weapon, fashion a bandana into a mask, walk in and look your victim in the eye and drag off a heavy sack of loot with the local gendarmes in pursuit. Now you can order a latte, while playing online games as your bank account gets fatter and someone’s account gets slimmer.
So should we run to the bank and get out all our money in pennies? No of course not. But neither should we discard the penny either. Think about it. Your savings, your paycheck, it’s all a line of numbers in some bank. All those hours of hard work, all that scrimping, saving, and self discipline are now a string of code that can be easily erased or altered. How insane is that? All I can tell you is good luck, keep your head down, and think.
Similarly some folks are pleased as punch with emails and texts, and tweets and would like to get rid of letters altogether or at least curtail mail delivery. Again the reasoning is sound as far as that goes. I myself cannot work without email. It’s basically all I do day in and day out. One simple contract with a foreign client could probably would take weeks if not months to finalize by regular postal mail. So why not just get rid of all letters and make the postal service just deliver packages?
Again, a letter is a tangible thing. The thought that someone far away once held this very paper, that they took the time not to type and delete and retype but very carefully and physically record their thoughts in ink, that makes it special.
These inconveniences make life real. They are not random 1’s and 0’s that can be altered on a whim. Long after the hard drives are erased, and the last digital record gets scrapped these will remain.
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