Obsolescence

I don't leave jobs. Jobs leave me. The introvert in me would rather put up with less than ideal working conditions and compensation than face the prospect of meeting new people. The first job I got out of school was great and I stayed there five years. I would have stayed longer but the company left for the west coast. None of my friends were making the move so I opted to do the same. Either way I was going to be working with new people anyway. I stayed at my next job almost twenty years. In that time the company grew and shrank. Products and strategies shifted. People came and went but a small core group of us remained steady. Finally, a last attempt at reinvention failed and bankruptcy soon followed. Even then, we stayed as management desperately tried to peddle the technology. At the very last hour, a large corporation stepped in, bought the company and hired us on. We survived a few more years before it was decided our branch did not fit with the new corporate vision and we were finally truly closed. I don't leave jobs. Jobs leave me.

Being there at the end of a company is a surreal thing. In those last days after it was announced that our branch was closing, we worked mostly on documenting what we had been doing and cleaning out the place. The back closets still housed ghosts from earlier decades - computers, once fought over for their processor power, now abandoned because of their inability to run the latest operating systems. As we surveyed the place, a general rule of thumb emerged: If it plugged in, it was probably obsolete and worthless. The simpler the item, the more likely it could be reused. Waste baskets, tables, scissors all had value. Computers, monitors and televisions, not so much. The main exception to the "plug-in" rule was in the break room where the toaster, coffee maker and refrigerator still served a purpose.

Obsolescence is such a cruel thing. How quickly do our shiny new toys become tomorrow's afterthought, replaced by something even shinier? We are living in a time of rapid change. Technology is hurtling forward at a pace not seen before. Still, for all the new gadgets, how often do we see something truly unique that can actually stand the test of time? Most inventions, it seems, just replace their most recent predecessor, as if we are still just trying to get it right. And in the meantime, our stacks of records, cassettes, CDs, etc. grow and gather dust in a corner.

I started thinking about all this obsolescence as I watched my oldest son registering for high school. When I think back about the classes I took in high school and college, I realize that many of the technical ones, the ones tied to my major, were the like the records I was listening to at the time - useful but quickly replaced by something different. Mathematics, English, writing, these were the tables and scissors - still as useful today as they were then.