Were you ever really bad at something, and then a new technology came along that made the ability to do that something obsolete?
For me, spell check saved my life. Before spell check I would get horrible grades in writing classes because my submissions would always contain multiple spelling errors. When I starting typing my submissions none of that mattered anymore.
Now as long as I type everything I write no one will know my dirty little secret.
As for writing on paper, I was browsing the web today and found this. I’m prone to writing errors, which are made noticeable due to multiple cross-outs and Wite-Out corrections. Now that Sharpie has made an erasable liquid pencil, no one will have to discover my other dark secret.
I know how you feel… I’ve actually had to say to people “Yes, that **is **my actual signature… no, I’m not trying to be funny. Here, see my driver’s license” more than once.
My signature is kind of a line with a loop in it. No actual name is involved. I get a lot of “Are you a doctor” or “You must be a doctor” or “you write like a doctor” comments. But it’s the signature I’ve been using all my life. If I try to sign my name, like, written out it looks awful…and it takes me too long to do it anyways. I wish I had good handwriting but I don’t. So back to the OP, the computer made that irrelevant. I was one of the first kids to get a home computer (1985). I remember always asking if I could type something instead of hand write it. Throughout the years it went very very slowly from “ahhhh, no I’d prefer if you hand wrote it” to “ummmm well, I guess that would be okay” to “yes that’s just fine” and finally to “everything must be typed.”
I like to joke that handguns have made me much more effective at hole punching paper than I used to be.
Automobiles help counter the fact that I am fat and lazy, and am not a very fast runner (At my last PT test, I could run a mile and a half in 11 minutes, 52 seconds. I’d never get away from the cheetah. In my Pontiac Grand Am, I might not even notice the cheetah was there unless he jumped out in front of me.
But yeah, I write horribly, I type at around 100WPM or more, depending on if I’m typing my own text or doing one of those painful transcribing tests.
The internet helps to counter my social awkwardness, as sad as that sounds to say. I have friends in real life, I just don’t mesh as seamlessly in social interactions as many folks seem to.
I’ve seen signature stamps before, both of the kind where it is an actual rubber stamp of your signature, or various types of stamps with your name on it to serve as a signature. When I was in tech school, many of the sergeants had stamps made with their rank and name, along with their position, since they presumably had to sign quite a bit of paperwork while dealing with training airmen.
Similarly, when studying Chinese, I learned that many East-Asian cultures have used name-stamps as their signatures for quite a while (those fancy little red boxes you see in the corners of Japanese artwork, for example)
I got a TomTom GPS for my car two years ago, and since then I think I’ve been lost maybe twice, both times when I accidentally left the device in our other car. I used to get lost on a near-daily basis, even within miles of my own house. It was a constant, constant struggle for me to remember which direction to turn, where things were located, etc. Having the GPS is such a relief, you don’t even know.
The computer is a boon for disorganized people. I very rarely have to find important papers in the house any more- it’s all either stored on the computer, or online somewhere. It no longer matters so much that I can’t organize papers so that I can find them again.
I love my GPS, but I found it to be a but of a curse as well. A few years back, I was standing up in a wedding a few hours from my house. The rehearsal, wedding and reception were all at one location. So that meant driving from where I was staying (a friends house) to the rehearsal, then back. Then to the wedding, then back to drop off my wife and kid to sleep then back the the party and few more back and forths somewhere in between it all. I kept both addresses in my GPS and just used it to go back and forth. I couldn’t believe all that traveling back and forth I failed when I tried to do one of the trips without my GPS. The two places were less then 10 minutes away from each other with only one or two turns. It shouldn’t have been that hard. But since I never bothered to learn any street names or landmarks I drove right past my turn.
It reminded me of why elementary teachers wouldn’t let you use a calculator until they knew you had a good grasp of the arithmetic. The difference being that I will likely never in my life have to make that trip again (to the wedding location), and if I do it would be with a GPS.
But will that work when you need to use the plastic thing to write on the miniature screen on the credit-card reader at the cash register at the supermarket?
You know, it would be pretty cool if they had some kind of pressure-sensitive pad that could read a namestamp like that. Most of those credit card machines seem to be touch-sensitive rather than magic stylus sensitive lately though, so it’d probably leave some kind of imprint on it.
Technology that makes people’s weaknesses obsolete might be profitable, but technology that makes people’s skills obsolete is the kind of thing you can build entire economies on. At least until s many people are unemployable that no one can buy anything.
There is much truth in what you say. I do still try to mentally visualize my route, just in case the GPS goes haywire or starts directing me in circles (this happens a lot in downtown Columbus; I don’t know if it’s buildings interfering with the reception or what, but the GPS tends to wig out and start having me just make endless right turns). But I used to really try, really hard, to put a mental map of my surroundings in my head before going anywhere, and still wound up driving 20 minutes in the wrong direction more often than not, so the GPS has been hugely beneficial for me even if from time to time it does take me through a less-direct route somewhere.
