I have forgotten what it was like…

It is just gone 12pm on this cloudy, last Sunday of May, and I am sitting at my desk at home instead of than at Chessington World of Adventures where I was supposed to be enjoying the birthday celebrations of a friend of mine.

There was an email last week sent to everybody attending with specific instructions on where and when to meet. I read the email again last night to make sure I had all the details and off I went early this morning to be there on time. I arrived at Chessington at 9.40 which was a tiny bit earlier than agreed. However, suddenly, a doubt entered my mind: the meeting point was “the car park”, however, this car park was huge, so I decided to go towards the top of the car park, right next to the entrance of the adventure park. So there I waited, and waited, and waited a bit more. I saw how the queues for the ticket booth were getting bigger and bigger, but I didn’t want to join the queue in case I got to the end and my friends hadn’t turned up yet.

Now, the most important fact to this little story is that I didn’t take a mobile phone with me (long story short: my personal phone died a hundred years ago, so I use the work phone most of the time. However, the new work phones that we now have are utterly rubbish and run out of battery even if you are not using them. I had two lines of battery on Wednesday. I had none last night, despite the fact that I hadn’t used it since. And, the charger is at work – So, no, I didn’t have a mobile phone to take with me).

Still, I was confident that the instructions were clear enough for me not to need a phone. So I waited and waited, and waited a bit more (sorry, I am repeating myself, but it was a lot of waiting I did!).

At 10:30 I had waited for more than 45 minutes and my patience had run out. I decided to leave and come back home. Almost three hours of my life and 100 miles in the clock of my car that I am never going to get back.

So, yeah, how did we use to manage in the pre-internet/pre-mobile phone era? I think I’ve forgotten… I most definitely don’t remember this hassle and the pain of having to wait for someone for 45 minutes. When my friends and I agreed to meet somewhere there was no question that people would make it, without having to check and double check via internet or text. We have become too accustomed to rely on these new technologies and I can now say that we are pretty much lost without them.

How sad.

The Chi-car »« Not the best few weeks.