Thursday, December 3, 2009

I noticed an interesting phenomenon today on my way to work. I drive through a neighborhood with homes that were built in the 1960's that all have an interesting and obsolete feature - a one-car garage. There have been several houses in the neighborhood that have since closed in the garages to make additional rooms but you can still tell that all the houses built in this time frame had single-car garages.

Contrast this to today's homes. Every new house has at least a two car garage if not a three or four car setup. It just shows how life has changed in the last 40-50 years. I think it also shows us how spoiled we are, especially during this downturn in the economy. The fact is, as time goes on and the overall level of wealth increases, what we expect increases with it. Whereas a one-car garage used to be sufficient as evidenced by the number of houses sold with a single bay, nowadays a two-car is the bare minimum. This is because we cannot conceive of a world (at least in Huntsville) where a family would only own one car.

Think about the other items that you own that are ubiquitous but astounding: computers, cell phones, credit/debit cards, iPods... the list could go on. All of these we see as rights, not privileges and we get angry when something or someone limits our access to these "rights".

Speaking of common technology - I saw a woman dial and/or texting on her phone today in her car. This normally would not have been worth noticing except that she had her blinker on and was trying to merge and a car was stopped to let her in but could get her to look up to see the opening. It was actually kind of funny to see someone trying to be nice while the other driver could stop was she was doing long enough to see that.

I also noticed that they have put the stripes down on the overpass on the Parkway which may mean that they are nearing completion on the construction which means that my commute time will be reduced by 10 minutes or so which will be really nice although I'm sure I'll see less stuff to blog about.

Let me know what you saw today...