Back to the Stone Age….. 1985

Back to the Stone Age…. 1985.

 

Meet Larry. This morning Larry woke up, showered, made a cup of coffee and read the morning paper. He licked the stamp and posted it on the letter to his son, Ryan, who is away at college. Ryan had a rough week because he stood in line for three hours to sign up for Magazine Writing and when he got to the front is was full. Ryan spent a total of eight hours on campus signing up for classes and then spent five hours in the library doing book research for his cemetery project.

 Larry rides his bike to work now because he had to sell his car for rent money. He lost all of his money just like everyone else when the stock market crashed. How do people expect to trade stocks and have their businesses run smoothly when they can’t connect to the outside world?

 Larry has a busy day ahead. He has to swing by the travel agents office to book his flight to go see Ryan for Thanksgiving but first he has to go to the bank and move some money around. He hates going to the bank now because the lines are so much longer than they used to be when there was online banking. After that he has to ride to PG&E and pay his electric bill.

Larry misses his old job at Apple. He used to design ipods and iphones, but there is no use for those products anymore so Apple let him go. It doesn’t matter though because Apple closed down a month later anyway. Now he works as a stocker at Safeway for minimum wage. He counts down the time until he can go home and watch the six o’clock news to see if they covered the debates today. They didn’t last week and Larry wants to know the candidates stance on health care and how to fix the economic crisis. 

One thing you should know about Larry is he isn’t real. He is a fictional character and lives in a post Internet world. Americans are very dependent on the Internet and a lot of financial systems are maintained online. If the Internet were to crash there would be chaos in the Financial Markets and communication would come to a halt.

But it should be stated that for us college kids, Larry’s life seems unreal and old fashion. But there are 20 million homes in the U.S. that have never had Internet connection. So even though I think the economy would severely suffer and businesses would fail, life can still go on. It would be just like the Stone Age…. Probably somewhere around 1985.