Efficiency Complex

With the type of studying that I did in graduate school, I've become very enamored with the concept of efficiency. It's clear, looking around, that the rest of the world is as well. This makes good sense: we have computers and microchips in everything that can be programmed to do the "little" things for us, thus freeing up our minds to focus on the bigger things.

In a way, this might be a bit of double-edged sword. We've all read the little dictum that "sweating the small stuff" can be hazardous to our health, but it's a dangerous situation when we decide to stop paying attention to details.

I thought about this a lot during the spring, as my class mates and I pored over cover-letters and resumes for each of the countless job applications that we sent out. Invariably (I dare you to write 20-plus cover letters and not have a typo) we'd realize that we'd sent one in with some grammatical error that would surely disqualify us from consideration. I'll admit it, I sent in an application packet to a consulting firm and then realized a week later that my cover-letter was missing a period.

These depressing realizations were always accompanied by the same exclamation: "But the green line didn't appear!!!"

Our word processors and web browsers have become so "smart" that they now do most of the work for us. We can write an entire document without even capitalizing our own letters or bothering to put apostrophes in our contractions. Isnt that awesome?

And yes, in the rare occasion that we misspell "excited" or confuse "there" and "their," we expect our computers to either correct it instantly or throw one of those magical lines underneath it so we can do it ourselves. Of course, we don't usually have to figure out how to spell "apostrophes" on our own, we can just right-click and the computer helps us again (yes, I did that in the previous paragraph).

I never thought too much about this. It made my life easier and didn't seem to have much cost associated with it (other than the $500 price tag of some office-software suites that shall remain nameless). Yet, the implications of it all came crashing upon me as I was getting out of my car last night.

Holly and I bought a new car, and for our purposes it is basically "tricked out." Among other things, its entry/ignition system is such that you have to do NOTHING in order to get into and out of the car and start it. You walk up to the door with the key in your pocket and it unlocks. You press a button on the dashboard and it--recognizing the key in your pocket--starts. Once you're driving, if it gets dark or starts raining, the headlights come on for you (I've always had such a difficult time recognizing darkness, so this is very helpful to me).

When you get to your destination, don't worry about turning off the headlights or locking the door. Just walk away and the car--sensing your departure--takes care of everything for you.

Now, this is all fantastic. In fact I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen. But it scares the dickens out of me. This whole situation is just begging for me to lose my keys or leave my other car's headlights on--for it I still have to do all of the luminary work, like a sucker--and kill the battery.

So, I've become worried. Will the efficient-riffic (yes, I invented that word just now and no, Firefox is not happy about it) technology at our command cause us to lose track of the small stuff? I have an efficiency complex, but I also have a "details complex." Life is what happens in the details: the stroke of a paintbrush or a note on a page of music or (in my professional life, sorry) the meaning of an individual observation to a larger truth.

Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful for technology. I'm hardly a Luddite. I prefer using analysis software and a calculator to a slide-rule and a pencil. I don't want to turn back the clock or banish my Macbook from my life. I just want to remember that though we're not supposed to sweat the small stuff, it all turns out to be "small stuff." So, with computers and cars and software geniuses taking care of it all for us, what is left?