The future is now

Remember when we were kids and we watched the futuristic shows on TV?  I was so excited for the time when we had the conveyor belts that dressed you in the morning like in the Jetsons.  The flying cars and hoverboards were awesome too.

 

I was traveling to California this week, and I noticed quite a few areas where we just have not lived up to the Jetson/Star Trek/Back to the Future standard.

Elevators

They don’t zoom you around.  They don’t make cool whooshing noises when the doors open and close.  You can’t even turn off a button once you press it.  How advanced does your technology need to be in order to allow deselecting a floor?

 

Lines

I really thought that in the future we could eliminate waiting in line.  I don’t know why I assumed this, except that waiting blows.

 

Airplanes

I don’t know exactly how this should be handled, but I’m pretty sure the way we fly around is fucked up.  Do we really need to take up cabin space with overhead bags?  Is there not some way that we could arrange to give enough leg room that those of us over 5 feet tall don’t get deep vein thrombosis?  I also thought by now we would all be debarking by way of trap door in the floor.

 

Road travel

Even when we try to apply modern technology we screw it up.  I’m sitting at a ramp to get on the freeway, and I’m waiting on this traffic light.  (Sorry Californians, but we don’t have these in Florida.)  The light goes from red to green to red like a blinker allowing one car through at a time.  Think about this for a minute.  Does this technological advancement remind you of anything?  It’s called a stop sign.  If only we could come up with a device that allows a free flow of traffic where one lane yields to another…

As I was trying to charge my iPhone in my rental car (unsuccessfully because the port was made for an iPod) I came to this sobering conclusion.  The future is never coming.  Sorry folks.  I’m pretty sure that future technology is going to be geared around erections, boobs, fast food, and Paris Hilton.  I was really looking forward to that transporter too.