Picture this: You’re at a stop light. It seems to be taking forever for it to turn green. You become impatient. You start yelling. You’re wondering why it hasn’t changed. Finally it does change and you peel out. You’re angry because it took entirely too long. It’s been an astounding and unfathomable 3 minutes.
Here’s another scenario: You’re at your computer, you’re on Google and you’re searching for something…The screen freezes, you see the little “thingy” going around so you know it’s “working,” and still nothing. You become impatient, you check your connection, check the cache, check your security settings. finally the page loads…and you think, I’ve got to get a new machine; yet it’s only been an incredible 2 minutes of agony and frustration.
Why are we like this? How has it come to this? Blame it on technology. You see technology has set an unrealistically high bar of expectation for speed and delivery for everything that is not technology related. Whether it’s your toaster, the elevator, the manager at a hotel, the service at the restaurant, the boarding of the airplane, checkout at the grocery store, customer service on the phone or the drive-thru of your favorite restaurant. If we don’t get what we want and need NOW, we have a melt down.
Like the New York Times says, “We need a reset.”
The problem is that we’re armed with so much more information, access and ability so quickly through technology, that it has lead people to expect, demand and want the same type of results from their offline experiences. Is that realistic? Probably not.
