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There was a time when I worked the equivalent of 2 full-time jobs, shared housework with my husband, and tended to the ‘his and hers’ collection of offspring we shared, collectively. I was younger, had more energy, and required more sleep.

Today, much older, I never seem to finish more than one item a day, of import, on my priority list. I am reminded of my long-deceased mother-in-law who, after she passed 70, always planned one ‘event’ a day other than personal or household maintenance... She had time to knit, read, go to the hairdresser, stay current with friends, and teach her grandchildren to observe and understand Nature, attend theater and so much more. My own mother who, once moved back to her home in the city, found time to make slipcovers, sew coats for her grandchildren from old drapes, bake bread, make yogurt and the list goes on.

A good day to me, now that I work a much more limited patient schedule, is when I am able to get out of bed, perform my ablutions, eat something that doesn’t require preparation, get dressed, catch up on my e-mail, and then reverse the procedure to get ready for bed! Gone are my leisurely hours of piano playing, knitting, rug hooking, working with stained glass, water coloring, silversmithing, hiking, photographing, canoing, biking, caring for the elder generation, and all those activities that leap into the vacuum called empty nest.

An ‘event’ in my life now is when I can get through to a service representative I fill almost all my recreational and non-recreational time trying to understand for what I am being billed, why something is no longer working and what to do about it, and finding the best to keep my house from becoming as dysfunctional as some of the people around me. Managing the phone maze is formidable. “If this, press 1, if that, press 2”, and, if you make a mistake, a lovely voice tells you she does not understand that command and either hangs up on you or suggests another number to take you back to the Main Menu. I have visions of incompetent, young MBAs who think they have planned and covered all exigencies and no longer need to have 0 to press for a human to answer.

When opting to change a credit card from one that offered air miles ( $50 yearly service charge) to one with no fee and refund of a tiny percentage of what I have spent, I found myself ‘transferred’ on the phone to ‘John’, (with a distinct accent, somewhere in India he answered me upon my question, on a wireless phone that kept having dead spots.) I felt distinctly uncomfortable giving this faceless, male voice my Social Security number and all sorts of personal and financial information when the company already had it all on file.

“Yes, ma’am, I know the company has all that on file but I do not have access to any other account.” With all the data bases Citibank must maintain, I found it worrisome that he couldn’t save my time by accessing the information he insisted on having me repeat, rather than risking me repeated information might be hi-jacked. Then I remembered being in an Emergency Room about to go into shock with the clerk (though I said no information had changed since I was last there) asking if I still resided at *****, If my phone number was still ****, if my husband still worked at **** (at which point I told her she was losing me and could pick me up off the floor. Someone noticed my color and screamed, “Quick, she’s going into shock!” The world is full of blind and deaf, human robots.

A recent Globe article by Ellen Goodman, sent to me by a friend, started me thinking along lines that I experience viscerally but never translated to language. I remembered the self checkout lines at Home Depot, the lack of bags (or boxes that don't quickly fall apart) at Costco. There is even more reason to be happy to have a computer when you have to pay more to buy a plane ticket by phone. Here is another example being tested in Denver of the Do-It-Yourself world we are becoming.

The only do-it-yourself service about which I have no complaint is Google on my computer. I can instantly look up a word and get better understanding of what I am reading, and answer most questions I may on how to do things by myself. This is directly helpful to me and saves time, unlike the phone mazes and many savings of time that directly serve someone other than myself or a company in whose stock I have no investment!